General programming question. When to use OOP?

Question

My program needs to do 2 things.

1. Extract stuff from a webpage.

2. Do stuff with a webpage.

However, there are many webpages, su

Answer 1

Put as much of the common stuff together in a single function. Once you've factored as much out as possible, build a mechanism for branching to the appropriate function for each website.

One possible way to do this is with python's if/else clauses, but if you have many such functions, you may want something more elegant such as

F = __import__('yourproject.facebookmodule')

This lets you put the code that's specific for facebook in it's own area. Since you pass __import__() a string, you can modify that at runtime based on which site you're accessing, and then just call function F in your generic worker code.

More on that here: http://effbot.org/zone/import-confusion.htm