Finding Lyrics

I was looking some lyrics up online this week, so I wondered how hard to would be to write a simple application to find lyrics to your favourite song.  Or to your least favourite song.  Or, in fact, to any arbritrary song.  Via programmableweb, I found the API to lyricsfly, which looked easy to use.  Another IronPython console app beckoned.

Keeping it simple, I decided to use optparse to parse the command-line options and urllib to make the http calls.  This way the program can be called with the user_id that lyricsfly requires (head to their website and you can get a temporary weekly key to try this out) along with the artist name and song title.  What I decided not to do at this stage was to process the resulting XML.  Or handle any errors.  Or handle cases where the user_id, artist or title is not supplied.  But, although rudimentary, it works.  Here’s the code:

from System import Console

import urllib

from optparse import OptionParser

print "Starting"

parser = OptionParser()

parser.add_option("-i", "--user_id",

                  action="store", type="string", dest="user_id",

                  help="The user id for the Lyrics Fly service")

parser.add_option("-a", "--artist",

                  action="store", type="string", dest="artist",

                  help="Artist name")

parser.add_option("-t", "--title",

                  action="store", type="string", dest="title",

                  help="Song title")                  

(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

print "Parsed options"

if (options.user_id):

    user_id = options.user_id

if (options.artist):

    artist = options.artist

if (options.title):

    title = options.title  

print "Getting Lyrics for " + artist + " - " + title 

query = urllib.urlencode([("i", user_id), ("a", artist), ("t", title)])   

url = "http://api.lyricsfly.com/api/api.php?" + query

print url

data = urllib.urlopen(url)

print data.read()

print

print "Press any key to exit.."

Console.ReadKey()