Write More Code
Write code everyday. Code fast and break things. Cherish your tracebacks. Keep going back, no matter how hopeless it may seem. Code habitually. Learn how to code. Get better at code. Love code.
Write Less Code
Use as few lines as possible. Nothing looks better than a program shorter than 50 or 100 lines! Avoid aggressively gnarly one-liners. Use sensible one-liners or [gasp] for loops. Read other people's code.
Write more code, write less code.
You may or may not be familiar with PyCon's Lightning Talks, a session of quick hitter talks given each year on a variety of topics. These "Lightning Scripts" are ten of my favorite Python scripts that have served me well as of late to perform a variety of tasks.
Highlights include the glob, os, calendar, webbrowser and pandas modules. Plus, how to convert a dataframe into a pdf and how to take a snapshot of a website with pdfkit. The webpage pdf was not the greatest snapshot in some cases, but did capture text and many of a live website's visual elements.
If you have Python installed, paste the script into a text editor and run your .py file from the command line or however you like to run your scripts. You may have to change file paths to work on your operating system.
(1) Uppercase all of the file names in the current working directory.
1 2 3 4 | import os filenames = os.listdir(os.getcwd()) for filename in filenames: os.rename(filename, filename.upper()) |
os module documentation
(2) Get all filenames in the current directory and write to a text file.
1 2 3 4 5 | import os folder_contents = os.listdir(os.getcwd()) with open("list_of_dir_files.txt","w") as fhand: for item in folder_contents: fhand.write('f{item}\n') |
(3) Check what day of the week is today.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | import calendar from datetime import date today = date.today() if calendar.day_name[today.weekday()] == 'Friday': print("Today is Friday.") else: print("Today is not Friday.") |
(4) Get the two most recent file names from a directory. This is a Windows file path example. I have escaped the backslashes below to make it work in my Atom text editor.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | import glob import getpass import os # getctime == by created date, getmtime == by date modified # get all files, regardless of extension folder = f'C:/Users/{getpass.getuser()}/Desktop/' list_of_files = glob.glob(folder) newest_file = sorted(glob.iglob('C:/Users/your_username/Desktop/*.csv'), key=os.path.getmtime)[-1] second_newest_file = sorted(glob.iglob('C:/Users/your_username/Desktop/*.csv'), key=os.path.getmtime)[-2] print(newest_file, second_newest_file) |
glob module documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/glob.html#glob.iglob
(5) Auto-Hamilton Ticket Lottery
1 2 | import webbrowser webbrowser.open('https://www.luckyseat.com/hamilton-chi/', new=0) |
webbrowser PMOTW: https://pymotw.com/3/webbrowser
python -m pip install pandas
(6) Split a csv file into smaller excel files.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | import pandas as pd file_name = 'big_file.csv' # slice off extension src_file_minus_ext = file_name.split('.')[:-1] for i, df in enumerate(pd.read_csv(file_name, chunksize=250000)): csv = f'{src_file_minus_ext}{str(i)}.csv' df.to_csv(csv, index=False, header=df.columns) |
pandas beginner tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JnMutdy6Fw
(7) Convert a .xlsx to .csv
1 2 3 | import pandas as pd df = pd.read_excel("input.xlsx") df.to_csv("output.csv", index=False) |
(8) Convert a .xlsx to .html
1 2 3 4 | import pandas as pd file_name = "data.xlsx" df = pd.read_excel(file_name) df.to_html("data.html") |
pdfkit relies on another library, wkhtmltopdf, which adds an extra wrinkle to setting it up for Windows users. I've laid out the differences between using pdfkit for Windows vs. Ubuntu below.
python -m pip install pdfkit
installing wkhtmltopdf on Windows
To use pdfkit on Windows, go to the link, choose your version to download. This installs a Windows executable that pdfkit needs to find to work.
https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html
installing wkhtmltopdf on Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf **For Windows, **\ `download wkhtmltopdf <https://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html>`__\ ** and add this config patch for pdfkit:**
1 2 3 4 | import pdfkit url = 'https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/grammys-alicia-keys-best-moments-as-host-1185013' config = pdfkit.configuration(wkhtmltopdf='C:\\Program Files\\wkhtmltopdf\\bin\\wkhtmltopdf.exe') pdfkit.from_url(url, 'webpage.pdf', configuration=config) |
4 Convert a .html file to .pdf. (Add config patch above for Windows.)
1 2 | import pdfkit pdfkit.from_file('data.html', 'report.pdf') |
5 Create a pdf snapshot of a webpage on Ubuntu below. (Add config patch above for Windows.)
1 2 3 | import pdfkit url = 'https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/grammys-alicia-keys-best-moments-as-host-1185013' pdfkit.from_url(url, 'alicia_keys.pdf') |
pdfkit documentation: https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/
Final Thoughts
I am very pleased with pdfkit. I am also toying around with Python's PyFPDF: https://pyfpdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html and PyPDF2: https://pythonhosted.org/PyPDF2 libraries. Together, these three offer some unique abilities for creating and manipulating pdf files. And the pandas library is amazing for reading and writing tabular data sheets, can't say enough great things about pandas. Worth the time. Hope you enjoyed these Lightning Scripts :)