diff --git a/docs/_writing_scripts.rst b/docs/_writing_scripts.rst
index 30495ec37..5e695da30 100644
--- a/docs/_writing_scripts.rst
+++ b/docs/_writing_scripts.rst
@@ -5,10 +5,10 @@ Many common bioinformatics applications are available on the `Tool Shed`_
 already and so a common development task is to integrate scripts of
 various complexity into Galaxy.
 
-Consider the following small Perl script.
+Consider the following small Python script.
 
-.. literalinclude:: writing/gc_content.pl
-   :language: perl
+.. literalinclude:: writing/gc_content.py
+   :language: python
 
 One can build a tool for this script as follows and place the script in
 the same directory as the tool XML file itself. The special value
diff --git a/docs/writing/gc_content.pl b/docs/writing/gc_content.pl
deleted file mode 100644
index 686afd9c5..000000000
--- a/docs/writing/gc_content.pl
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,23 +0,0 @@
-#!/usr/bin/perl -w
-
-# usage : perl toolExample.pl <FASTA file> <output file>
-
-open (IN, "<$ARGV[0]");
-open (OUT, ">$ARGV[1]");
-while (<IN>) {
-    chop;
-    if (m/^>/) {
-        s/^>//;
-        if ($. > 1) {
-            print OUT sprintf("%.3f", $gc/$length) . "\n";
-        }
-        $gc = 0;
-        $length = 0;
-    } else {
-        ++$gc while m/[gc]/ig;
-        $length += length $_;
-    }
-}
-print OUT sprintf("%.3f", $gc/$length) . "\n";
-close( IN );
-close( OUT );
diff --git a/docs/writing/gc_content.py b/docs/writing/gc_content.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..c761d081f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/writing/gc_content.py
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python2
+import sys
+
+# usage : python gc_content.py <FASTA file> <output file>
+
+name = None
+with open(sys.argv[1]) as infile:
+  with open(sys.argv[2], 'w') as outfile:
+    for line_raw in infile:
+      line = line_raw.rstrip('\r\n')
+      if line.startswith('>'):
+        if name is not None:
+          outfile.write(name+': '+str(gc/float(total))+'\n')
+        name = line[1:]
+        gc = 0
+        total = 0
+      else:
+        gc += line.count('G') + line.count('C')
+        total += len(line)
+    outfile.write(name+': '+str(gc/float(total))+'\n')
diff --git a/docs/writing/gc_content.xml b/docs/writing/gc_content.xml
index dd2cd5805..9e9d8a0a7 100644
--- a/docs/writing/gc_content.xml
+++ b/docs/writing/gc_content.xml
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 <tool id="gc_content" name="Compute GC content">
   <description>for each sequence in a file</description>
-  <command>perl $__tool_directory__/gc_content.pl $input output.tsv</command>
+  <command>python $__tool_directory__/gc_content.py $input output.tsv</command>
   <inputs>
     <param format="fasta" name="input" type="data" label="Source file"/>
   </inputs>