#!/usr/bin/env python from urllib import urlretrieve def firstNonBlank(lines): for eachLine in lines: if not eachLine.strip(): continue else: return eachLine def firstLast(webpage): f = open(webpage) lines = f.readlines() f.close() print firstnonblank(lines), lines.reverse() print firstnonblank(lines), def download(url='http://www', process=firstLast): try: retval = urlretrieve(url)[0] except IOError: retval = None if retval: # do some processing process(retval) if __name__ == '__main__': download()