On 06/13/2013 03:28 PM, buford.lum...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi, I'm new to Python. Would someone be able to write me and/or to show me how
to write a simple program that:
Hi, welcome to Python, and to the Python-list
It's NOT a simple program, except by a very constrained definition of
simple.
1-follows a hyperlink from MS Excel to the internet (one of many links like
this, http://www.zipdatamaps.com/76180, for e.g.) and then,
2-copies some data (a population number, e.g. 54195) and then,
3-pastes that data back into the same MS Excel spreadsheet, into the adjacent
cell.
... and that’s it... row after row of hyperlinks all in one column...
What's the real problem, or is it assignment? Do you have lots of
repetitive data you want to fetch once a day from many websites? Do you
have an assignment that constrains you to use Excel and Windows, and
Python? Do you have a boss that likes innovation? Are you supposed to
fetch the links from a live instance of Excel ?
What version of Python, and what OS does this have to run on?
If you break the problem into its component parts, SOME of them are
fairly simple. If you try to solve the problem as a whole, it's not
simple, unless you can just copy much of it from your textbook, or from
earlier assignments.
If this were my problem, I'd throw out Excel to begin with. If your
hyperlinks happen to be in an excel spreadsheet, then export them,
probably to a csv file. Do that by hand. If it later proves valuable
to automate that, consider it a new problem. Similarly getting the data
back into Excel -- just use csv files.
So now you have a URL, and you want to get something from the web. You
could use one of the urlib libraries to fetch the page. You're pretty
vague about "some data" but you could use substring to extract some
bytes from the page.
You can use the csv module to load in the spreadsheet, and iterate
through the rows. For each row, you could use the previous paragraph to
convert the URL into some data. Then write the row back out, but to a
different csv file.
If you want anything more specific than that (and probably not from me),
you'd have to get a lot more specific about your real requirements. And
convince somebody that it's not homework.
--
DaveA
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