[Biopython-dev] Bio.WWW.ExPASy

[Peter Cock]

> Bio.WWW.ExPASy contains six functions:
>
> get_prodoc_entry  Interface to the get-prodoc-entry CGI script.
> get_prosite_entry Interface to the get-prosite-entry CGI script.
> get_prosite_raw   Interface to the get-prosite-raw CGI script.
> get_sprot_raw     Interface to the get-sprot-raw CGI script.
> sprot_search_ful  Interface to the sprot-search-ful CGI script.
> sprot_search_de   Interface to the sprot-search-de CGI script.
>
> plus an internally used function _open....
>
> Any comments?

Is it worth adding "download many" functions like the one in GenBank?
If the web API doesn't let us download a list of records by ID, then
we might need some sort of handle wrapper to download them one by one
- that might be too complicated.

Also, regarding handling HTML error pages, you could reuse the simple
code in Bio/WWW/NCBI.py which hunts for certain HTML errors.  Or more
simply, try and spot when we get an HTML file instead of plain text?
There is a good case here for a shared "open a URL function" which can
spot HTML error pages.

Peter