Stack Overflow user info fetcher

I think your naming scheme is good and on first sight its very easy to see what the code does without having to study it too much.

However, if I would pick on something I would say:

• Remove the unnecessary whitespace, ex. if ( condition ), or self.getUserInfo( userId ). This is of course a matter of taste, but I find it more consistent with regular coding style to not 'bloat' with whitespace.

• optparser was deprecated in 2.7: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html

• in parser.add.option() you could remove the word "show" from the dest name and rather do the following, hence eliminating the need for all the declarations of show_display_name and still keep easy code readability.

  ...
  parser.add.option(parser.add_option("-r", "--reputation", action="store_true", dest="reputation", default=False, help="Show user's reputation")
  (show, args) = parser.parse_args()
  
  fetch = StackOverflowFetcher()
  if(show.reputation) : print fetch.getUserReputation(show.userId)
  

• I don't really see what the point of the following line which sets everything to true, it seems a bit weird since you use store_true as action if the option parsed is set.

  if ( (not show_display_name) and (not show_view_count) and (not show_reputation) ):
  show_display_name = show_view_count = show_reputation = True
  

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/users/string_id returns

{
  "error": {
    "code": 404,
    "message": "The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI."
  }
}

and will raise KeyErrors here:

def getUserDisplayName( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['display_name']

def getUserViewCount( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['view_count']

def getUserReputation( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['reputation']

http://api.stackoverflow.com/1.1/users/9924 returns

{
  "total": 0,
  "page": 1,
  "pagesize": 30,
  "users": []
}

and will raise IndexErrors here:

def getUserDisplayName( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['display_name']

def getUserViewCount( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['view_count']

def getUserReputation( self, userId ):
    return self.getUserInfo( userId )['users'][0]['reputation']

And since you are using userId as an argument to every method, and the StackOverflowFetcher instance is used only for 1 userId – it might me a good idea to add __init__ method:

__init__(self, userId):
    # some userId validation
    self.userId = userId

and save yourself a bit of passing userId around.

UPD:

If all options are set to True, this will call getUserInfo and, therefore, query api 3 times:

if ( show_display_name ) : print fetcher.getUserDisplayName( userId )
if ( show_view_count) : print fetcher.getUserViewCount( userId )
if ( show_reputation ) : print fetcher.getUserReputation( userId )

Since you call it at least once any way, you better call it in the __init__(), or just store retrieved value in an instance attribute and use it like this:

def __init__(self, userId):
    #...
    self.userInfo = None

def getUserReputation(self):
    if self.userInfo is None:
        self.userInfo = self.getUserInfo()

    return self.userInfo['users'][0]['reputation']