pocket-recommendations

Unofficial library to get a feed of one's Pocket recommendations

Status

After reading Four Thousand Weeks I realized that Pocket is one of my infinite to-do lists. I stopped using it and it makes no sense for me to maintain this library. Feel free to fork this or contact me if you feel like continuing the development.

Usage

Get a public Pocket profile, like this one. Download its HTML using Python or anything else:

$ curl "https://getpocket.com/@honzajavorek" > getpocket-com-honzajavorek.html

In your Python program, have the HTML ready as a string:

>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> html_text = Path('getpocket-com-honzajavorek.html').read_text()

Now you can use this library to parse the HTML:

>>> import pocket_recommendations
>>> items = pocket_recommendations.parse(html_text)
>>> len(items)
50

Each item then looks like this:

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> pprint(items[0])
{'pocket_comment': 'Šablona na váš úspěšný HackerNews post',
 'pocket_recommended_at': None,
 'pocket_url': 'https://getpocket.com/redirect?&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsaagarjha.com%2Fblog%2F2020%2F05%2F10%2Fwhy-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology%2F&h=eff6d8cac22c9b475463d037037b0efdcf44b762c9b0b7913de2104cab5fa67d',
 'title': 'Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY',
 'url': 'https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/05/10/why-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology/'}

Even though Pocket uses HTTP links for the redirects, the library forces HTTPS.

Date of Recommendation

You can specify the date when the HTML has been downloaded to get the relative dates when the recommendations have been posted:

>>> from datetime import date
>>> items = pocket_recommendations.parse(html_text, today=date(2020, 6, 3))
>>> pprint(items[0])
{'pocket_comment': 'Šablona na váš úspěšný HackerNews post',
 'pocket_recommended_at': datetime.date(2020, 6, 2),
 'pocket_url': 'https://getpocket.com/redirect?&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsaagarjha.com%2Fblog%2F2020%2F05%2F10%2Fwhy-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology%2F&h=eff6d8cac22c9b475463d037037b0efdcf44b762c9b0b7913de2104cab5fa67d',
 'title': 'Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY',
 'url': 'https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/05/10/why-we-at-famous-company-switched-to-hyped-technology/'}

Missing Comment

If there is no comment, it is set to None:

>>> from datetime import date
>>> items = pocket_recommendations.parse(html_text)
>>> pprint(items[15])
{'pocket_comment': None,
 'pocket_recommended_at': None,
 'pocket_url': 'https://getpocket.com/redirect?&url=https%3A%2F%2Falmad.blog%2Fessays%2Fwhat-is-employment%2F&h=ef4216c9df41763fa900b12815a280bf790f50960468a45ebed5f3682156dc6a',
 'title': "We Don't Know What an Employment Is",
 'url': 'https://almad.blog/essays/what-is-employment/'}

Misinterpreted HTML Entities

If the title contains some misinterpreted HTML entities, the library takes care of it:

>>> from datetime import date
>>> items = pocket_recommendations.parse(html_text)
>>> pprint(items[15])  # title: We Don't Know What an Employment Is
{'pocket_comment': None,
 'pocket_recommended_at': None,
 'pocket_url': 'https://getpocket.com/redirect?&url=https%3A%2F%2Falmad.blog%2Fessays%2Fwhat-is-employment%2F&h=ef4216c9df41763fa900b12815a280bf790f50960468a45ebed5f3682156dc6a',
 'title': "We Don't Know What an Employment Is",
 'url': 'https://almad.blog/essays/what-is-employment/'}