Python Challenge level 4: “follow the chain”

Level 4 requires some web scraping. Nice :)

Hint 1: urllib may help. DON’T TRY ALL NOTHINGS, since it will never end. 400 times is more than enough
Hint 2: linkedlist.php?nothing=12345

import urllib,re
url='http://www.pythonchallenge.com/pc/def/
     linkedlist.php?nothing='
seed="12345"
for i in range(400):
    text=urllib.urlopen(url+seed).read()
    seed="".join(re.findall(r"nothing is (\d+)",text))
    try :
        int(seed)
        print "   Next:",seed
    except :
        print "   Last:",text
        break

When we get to 92118 the message is:

Yes. Divide by two and keep going.

So we’ll reset the seed to 46059

peak

Great. To Level 5.