Snakes in an Office

I’ve mentioned before that my job (whose contract is almost up) doesn’t require programming. But that doesn’t mean that programming is not useful. When I first got my laptop, I asked the tech guy about the process of installing new software. It went something like this:

1. Write a formal request for the software you would like installed and submit it to the tech support department.
2. Wait for review and approval.
3. Wait for them to install it.

A pretty standard (and painful) process in large organizations, unfortunately. I asked him, “So if I want to install Python I just submit one of these requests?”

Insead of answering my question, he asked me one in return. “What would you want to install Python for?!” I think he actually spat and curled his lips at the thought.

“I don’t know… writing basic scripts.” I really didn’t know what at the time, but I knew it would be useful. And I wanted to use it.

He proceeded to look at me as if I had suggested bathing in tomato sauce as a remedy for headaches.

So I was under the impression that I couldn’t install new software and didn’t want to bother going through all that formal cock holding; I went without my Firefox, my Python. I’ve since discovered that I can install things. (Sorta.)

Anyway, I was using Python at work today, and I just love it. Previously, I had been fumbling around with VBA in Excel and Word. I had a button set up in Word that would run a macro/VBA to export the form’s contents to a CSV file in a particular folder. I could open a Word document anywhere, press the export button, and the CSV would be created/overwritten in that folder. Then I had a button set up in Excel to run a macro that would import all CSV files in that folder as rows in the spreadsheet. (This was actually really useful, and if you have to deal with a lot of similar tasks in Office, use VBA and macros.) There was an inconsistency in the number of rows I had in my spreadsheet and the number of docs I had… so I wanted to compare the exported CSVs with the available DOCs.

Enter, the Python interpreter (great for little tasks and as a substitute shell on windows).

The word documents were in a bunch of different folders (for various reasons) but once I had a variable, originals, containing a list of all the documents, and a variable, exported, containing a list of all the CSV, files, I was rolling.


>>> len(originals), len(exported)
(198,200) # Hmmmm, looks like a job for sets!
>>> s1,s2 = (set(originals), set(exported))
>>> len(s1.difference(s2))
398
>>> # What the...
...
>>> originals
['doc1.doc', 'doc2.doc', ...., 'doc200.doc']
>>> exported
['doc1.txt', 'doc2.txt', ..., 'doc200.txt']
>>> # Oh yeah, different extensions. Duh...
... # Bus leaves SOON!
... # Need to quickly strip the extensions and rebuild the sets....
...
>>> s1,s2 = ( set([s[:-4] for s in s1]), set([s[:-4] for s in s2]) )
>>> s1
['doc1', 'doc2', ... , 'doc200']
>>> # Cool
...
>>> s1.difference(s2)
(['doc38', 'doc72'])


AHA!! Caught my bus. Python is great. 😀