I wrote this little script as a mental exercise and to prove the power of Python programming language. If anyone accepts the challenge, I’d like to see submissions in other programming langauges 
For the foreigners: this is the best comic in Finland, so I hope you’ll get translations soon! It tells about the relationship of a woman and a pig (sic) reflecting the deepest shadows of Finnish social life.
"""
Creats local mirror from Viivi & Wagner strips by fetching all of them from hs.fi.
Will create downloaded strips as
2004/1.1.2004.gif
2004/2.1.2004.gif
...
until today
Try this in C++!
Motivation: No one has build Viivi & Wagner search engine with speech bubble OCR support
and I desperately wanted to find "Kottarainen lentaa korvaan" strip for my gf.
Time to complete: 20 min.
"""
__docformat__ = "epytext"
__author__ = "Mikko Ohtamaa"
__license__ = "BSD"
__copyright__ = "2008 Mikko Ohtamaa"
import os
import re
import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
# 1.1.2004 start page
url = "http://www.hs.fi/viivijawagner/1073386660690"
# Loop until there is no longer next link
while True:
stream = urllib.urlopen(url)
html = stream.read()
stream.close()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
# Parse strip date from contents
date = None
# Find strip date, which is next to a title
h1 = soup.findAll(text="Viivi ja Wagner")
# Should be present always
date = h1[0].parent.parent.p.string
print "Fetching " + date
# Scrape strip
strip = soup.findAll("div" , { "class" : "strip" })
img = strip[0].img
stream = urllib.urlopen(img["src"])
data = stream.read()
stream.close()
# For each year, give a new folder to avoid file system stress
# (lotsa files in a folder kill poor Gnome)
day, month, year = date.split(".")
folder = year
if not os.path.exists(folder):
os.mkdir(folder)
# Store contents
fname = os.path.join(folder, date + ".gif")
f = open(fname, "wb")
f.write(data)
f.close()
# Find next url, it is a containing one img tag
img = soup.findAll(alt="seuraava")
if len(img) == 0:
break
a = img[0].parent
url = a["href"]
