I have the need to run periodic searches on the US Patent and Trademark Office website, <http://www.uspto.gov/>. I need a Python module to do this. Before I reinvent the wheel, I thought I'd check to see if anyone knew of such a beast.
For instance, I'd like to be able to pass an argument like one of these: an/"dis corporation" in/newmar-julie to http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-adv.htm and get a list of all the patents owned by Dis Corporation, or invented by the 1960s Catwoman actress; or pass a patent number like 4,150,505 to http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm to bring up a particular patent. Then I want to be able to parse out the patent metadata, e.g. inventor names, dates filed and issued, etc. Has this already been done? The closest my google searches have turned up is http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/1724 , but that turns out to be Perl rather than Python, and not quite dead-on anyway. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
