My First Python Program excites me

As I am decided to learn another programming language in addition to Delphi(pascal), Java, and Groovy, I choose Python. I am not in the position to say which language is better and there's no thing such as the best programming language. But what makes me choose Python over the other is because this is an easy to learn language that has been widely use in software application development.

For me the best and effective way to learn a new language is to develop an application with it. I want it to be something that has to do with the web and I look into what I can do with Django, but I can't come up with an good idea enough to motivate me to go thru the long learning process since I am still very new to python. One day when I am so sick and tired of visiting a certain web page where I need to keep record of a financial data into a excel file on a daily basis, this gives me an idea to automate this boring task. And this excites me as I have to deal with a lot of new things compare to what I do before, database application development with delphi on windows desktop platform.

Here I need to download the page, parse it with some help from regular expression, and write it into an excel file. But since I can't find a module that could read and write into an excel file, a thought came into my mind of exploring solutions from web services, since I've been hearing a lot of it and want to have a chance to work with it. After a short research I discover Google Spreadsheet API is what I need.

Putting it all together, in this short simple python application that I made I have touch a number of new things to me like HTML data processing with HTMLParser, Regular Expression, URLLIB, and Google Spreadsheet API. Now this is something really different from what I've been doing before.