This looks like a job for Perl, or possibly PHP?

[Alan Young]

Steve wrote:
> fetchpats which basically just creates the URL and passed the work to wget
> wget then pipes it's output to parsepats, parsepats cleans the input
> and stuffs it in the DB.

You don't need to write a program to create the url:

wget -O - http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/og/`date 
+%Y`/week`date +%W`/patexpi.htm

(no line breaks)

The '-O -' sends the output to STDOUT, you can parse the file from there.

Alan