quote.py

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# Benjamin Grant
"""
Libraries: 
 - requests (http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/) by Kenneth Reitz used for retrieving data from the web
 - BeautifulSoup4 (bs4) (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) by Leonard Richardson used for parsing HTML entities
"""
import json
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

#Edits 'message' with a random quote, courtesy of quotesondesign.com
async def generateQuote():
  
  url = 'http://quotesondesign.com/wp-json/posts?filter[orderby]=rand&filter[posts_per_page]=1'
  with requests.Session() as r:
    response = r.get(url).text #This returns the plaintext from quotesondesign.com
  
  try: 
    
    data = json.loads(response) #We use 'loads' because we are loading a string instead of a file 
    
    quote = BeautifulSoup(data[0]["content"], features="html5lib").find("p").string.strip() # Returns the quote with HTML entities decoded
    
    author = BeautifulSoup("<p>"+data[0]["title"]+ "</p>", features="html5lib").find("p").string.strip() # Returns the author with HTML entities decoded
    
    return "As " + author + " once said, '" + quote + "'"
    
  except ValueError as e: #Some quotes returned break the python json parser. There is no clear reason for this. As a 'temporary workaround', this will use recursion to fetch a new one if this happens!
    
    return generateQuote()
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