Enhancemen request: Look only at single user's comics

[griswolf]

I would like to (interactively?) enter my username and password so I can scrape all my comics that were updated "today". I have started coding this using BeautifulSoup and Selenium, but became more interested in other things and back-burnered it. I would prefer to avoid doing all the tricky bits myself.

Are you interested in doing this? If not, I'll soldier on, gradually... perhaps by pulling your code and extending, perhaps just keep going with my own.

[irahorecka]

Hello @griswolf, thanks for bringing this up. If I understand correctly, you want to download today’s strips for all the comic syndicates you’re interested in.

If that’s the case, you can list all comics available on gocomics.com using comics.directory.listall(). From there, you can filter down to the specific comics you want and loop through them daily to check for new strips. If a comic doesn’t have a strip for today, you can handle the error and move on; otherwise, you can process the available strips accordingly.

Let me know if that’s what you’re looking for!

---

Here’s a simple script using the comics library to find today’s strips for some popular comics and save them as PNG files.

import datetime
import os
import comics
from comics.exceptions import InvalidDateError

# List of well-known comic endpoints
COMIC_ENDPOINTS = [
    "peanuts",
    "calvinandhobbes",
    "garfield",
    "foxtrot",
]

# Get today's date in YYYYMMDD format
today_str = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y%m%d")

# Ensure output directory exists
os.makedirs("png", exist_ok=True)

# Loop through selected comics, fetch today's strip, and save as PNG
for endpoint in COMIC_ENDPOINTS:
    try:
        comic = comics.search(endpoint).date(datetime.datetime.now())
        save_path = f"png/{today_str}_{endpoint}.png"
        comic.download(save_path)
        print(f"Saved {comic.title} to {save_path}")
    except InvalidDateError as e:
        print(f"Skipping {endpoint}: {e}")

[griswolf]

That's close to what I want. I started this with the intent of using GoComics' UI much more efficiently while I'm on vacation in a v-e-r-y slow-internet zone. Why can it not show me all and only the subscribed comic's I've not yet seen? And for me, the comment section is part of the draw, which adds another layer of complexity. I'll consider whether your "stash the comic image" technique could be expanded to give me something like what I want. Thank you.

However I see in today's email an announcement of a "new and improved" GoComics which means all bets are off anyway, until they release.