import urllib from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import random def define(word): defs = [] url = 'http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s' % word soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib.urlopen(url).read(), 'html.parser') head = soup.find('div', id='headword') if head: for p in head.find_all('p'): defs.append(p.text.encode('ascii', 'ignore')) return defs key = open("/home/krowbar/.secret/key").readline().rstrip() def defWord(word): defs = [] url = 'http://www.dictionaryapi.com/api/v1/references/collegiate/xml/%s?key=%s' % (word, key) soup = BeautifulSoup(urllib.urlopen(url).read(), 'html5lib') entry = soup.find('entry') if entry: for d in entry.find_all('dt'): defs.append(d.text.encode('ascii', 'ignore')) return defs