Building a Command-Line Train Ticket Query Tool with Python

This tutorial guides you through creating a Python command‑line application named tickets that queries Chinese railway ticket information from the 12306 website.

First, design the CLI syntax: $ tickets [-gdtkz] <from> <to> <date> , where options select train types (high‑speed, bullet, etc.).

Set up a virtual environment with virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 venv and activate it using . venv/bin/activate .

Install docopt to parse arguments, and write a docstring defining usage; then call docopt(__doc__) inside the cli() function to obtain the parsed parameters.

Extract station codes by downloading https://kyfw.12306.cn/otn/resources/js/framework/station_name.js , parsing it with a regular expression in parse.py , and saving the mapping as stations.py :

# coding: utf-8
import re
from pprint import pprint
with open('stations.html', 'r') as f:
    text = f.read()
    stations = re.findall(u'([\u4e00-\u9fa5]+)\|([A-Z]+)', text)
    pprint(dict(stations), indent=4)

Build the request URL using the user‑provided date and station codes, then fetch JSON data with requests.get(url, verify=False) :

import requests
url = 'https://kyfw.12306.cn/otn/lcxxcx/query?purpose_codes=ADULT&queryDate={}&from_station={}&to_station={}'.format(date, from_station, to_station)
r = requests.get(url, verify=False)
data = r.json()

Process the returned JSON to obtain the list of train rows and format the output with prettytable for a readable table of train number, times, and seat availability:

from prettytable import PrettyTable
headers = '车次 车站 时间 历时 商务 一等 二等 软卧 硬卧 软座 硬座 无座'.split()
pt = PrettyTable()
pt.field_names = headers
for row in data['data']['datas']:
    # extract needed fields and add to table
    pt.add_row([...])
print(pt)

The complete source code is available at https://github.com/protream/tickets .