Interact with the CLI from other applications

The command line interface can be used by other applications/languages as a way to get information from gatherer without needing to write your own scraper.

As an example of how easy this makes things for external consumers, here's an example that will download "all" of gatherer to an 8.1 MB file using python 2.7:

import os
import itertools
import logging
import json
import subprocess

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
log = logging.getLogger()

# assuming that we're in the same directory as tutor's bin dir
TUTOR_DIR = os.path.realpath(os.path.dirname(__file__)) 
TUTOR_PATH = os.path.join(TUTOR_DIR, 'tutor')


def _query_tutor(command_parameters):
    """

    :param command_parameters:
    :return: the json-parsed output of the tutor command
    """

    command = [TUTOR_PATH, '--format', 'json'] + command_parameters

    try:
        return json.loads(subprocess.check_output(command).strip())
    except (subprocess.CalledProcessError, ValueError) as e:
        raise subprocess.CalledProcessError(u'problem with command',
                                            u' '.join(command))


def _query_tutor_for_cards_by_set(set_name):
    """
    :param set_name: the set's name, which will be passed to
        tutor's command line
    :return: a list of cards represented as dictionaries
    """

    log.debug('searching for set name: %r', set_name)
    return _query_tutor(['set', set_name])


def _query_tutor_for_all_sets():
    log.debug('searching for sets')
    return _query_tutor(['sets'])


def write_all_cards_from_gatherer_to_file():
    """
    :return: a dictionary mapping card names to the card's dictionary representation
    """
    all_sets = _query_tutor_for_all_sets()
    cards = {
        card['name']: card
        for card in itertools.chain(*[_query_tutor_for_cards_by_set(set_name)
                                      for set_name in all_sets])
    }

    json.dump(cards, open('cards.json', 'wb'))

if __name__ == '__main__':

    write_all_cards_from_gatherer_to_file()