Build a Python Web Scraper that Emails Daily Articles Automatically

Introduction

Hello, I am a Python enthusiast sharing a useful script I found in a Python group that automatically sends a daily article via email.

Implementation Idea

The idea consists of two parts: first, a Python web scraper that retrieves the daily article from a web page; second, an email‑sending routine that formats the article and delivers it to a specified recipient.

Implementation Process

The complete source code is shown below.

import requests
from lxml import etree
import time
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
from email.header import Header

account = '{0}'.format('请输入你的邮箱：')
password = '{0}'.format('请输入你的密码：')
receiver = '{0}'.format('请输入收件人的邮箱：')

def getArticle(url):
    global data
    headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.122 Safari/537.36'
    }
    r = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    html = etree.HTML(r.text)
    article = html.xpath('//h1/text() | //p[@class="article_author"]/span/text() | //div[@class="article_text"]/p/text()')
    data = '%s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s  %s' % (
        str(time.ctime()), '

《', str(article[0]), '》', '

作者：', str(article[1]), '

', str('
'.join(article[2:]))
    )
    with open('article.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        f.write(time.ctime() + '

《' + article[0] + '》' + '

作者：' + article[1] + '

')
        f.write('
'.join(article[2:]))
        f.write('

')
        print(data)
    return data

def send_email(data):
    global account, password, receiver
    mailhost = 'smtp.qq.com'
    qqmail = smtplib.SMTP_SSL(mailhost, 465)
    qqmail.login(account, password)
    content = '亲爱的，每日一文：' + data
    message = MIMEText(content, 'plain', 'utf-8')
    subject = '每日一文'
    message['Subject'] = Header(subject, 'utf-8')
    try:
        qqmail.sendmail(account, receiver, message.as_string())
        print('邮件发送成功')
    except:
        print('邮件发送失败')
    qqmail.quit()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    url = 'https://meiriyiwen.com'
    data = getArticle(url)
    send_email(data)

Replace the placeholders with your email address, email authorization code, and the recipient's address. For detailed configuration steps, refer to the guide at https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzU3MzQxMjE2NA==∣=2247498232&idx=1&sn=18e473486a4969973fc6b49b50f69059.

After running the script, the recipient will receive an email containing the fetched article, as shown below.

You can also schedule the script to run daily using a task scheduler, turning it into a personal daily reading reminder.

Conclusion

This article demonstrates a small project that combines Python web scraping and automated email sending to deliver a daily article automatically.