Python: YouTube Offline | rate my code?

Question

Hi

About:
I've been learning python on and off for a while now from stuff on the net and this is the first time I've actually completed a project. So was wondering if anyone with some real experience would be willing to look at the code and tell me where I should start improving(in terms of my knowledge) and what I should do with the code(continue to develop or start from scratch).

Language: Python 2.7

Description of the program:
It uses a command line interface that I made from scratch with what I think is called a functional approach and with only a few side effects. It's just under 400 lines and is a single file as I thought it was small enough. It's called YouTube Offline as it downloads and organizes content from youtube, either whole playlists or single videos. It uses youtube-dl to download which is a free open source module available here: http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
Although the UI is not graphical but through the shell(windows so far) it's still very user friendly and displays a static screen with a prompt, also allowing a few simple commands explained by typing help.

You can keep/use the source if you find it useful but will need to get download youtube-dl and python first as I haven't made an executable.

source: http://pastebin.com/N56R7C41

Thanks

Answer 1

I haven't run it, just looked at the code. Pretty nice. I like the way you handle the print_screen output.



One thing you might try is importing youtube-dl.py as a module, rather than running it through os.system(). Look at the very bottom of the source and there's a very small main() function that you can duplicate, except for exiting on an error. Add "import youtube_dl" at the top, then call youtube_dl._real_main() and catch the same exceptions (also with "youtube_dl." module name prefixes, except for KeyboardInterrupt) and do your own error message and recovery actions instead of sys.exit().

Answer 2

It's nice for a first project.



However, I didn't like the code very much. The driving function accesses some "data[comm_data[0]][comm_data[1]]", initialized gods know where, which I'm to believe is a playlist.



If I want to use some of your code, e.g. to find out if a certain user exists, or to get his playlist, I hardly can: I can't see a decent API for this. I'd want to be able to do "for clip in playlist.clips: ... clip.title ..." instead of doing something with "data[mumbo][jumbo[1]][2][i][0]" as if I were programming punch cards in the '60s.



I suggest you completely decouple the interface from the API. (And instead of print_screen() in the API implementation do logger.log() so programmers would be able to turn it off / redirect it / whatever.)



BTW, you don't have to do HTML parsing: Youtube has data API that returns JSON or XML: https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/reference



All in all, the code isn't bad. You have motivation/interest, and that's the most important thing.

Answer 3

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