I'm currently working on a little discord bot. To host it for free, I'm using an application on heroku.com which is connected to my github. Everytime I restart the bot it gets some previously stored information from a textfile (works perfectly).
f = open("example_textfile.txt", "r")
example_list = dict(json.loads(f.read()))
f.close()
Everytime a list gets updated it should overwrite the textfile with the updated list like this (does NOT work):
f = open("example_textfile.txt", "w")
f.write(json.dumps(example_list))
f.close()
If I host the bot locally on my PC everything works perfectly (then I need the path, not just the name of the file). But when I host it with Heroku it can only read the files but not overwrite them. Does anyone know why this doesn't work? Or is there any alternative? Would be great if you could help me :D (And sorry for my bad english xD. I'm not native)
This should work
json.dump(example_list, open("example_file.txt", "w"))
The reason the write method may not be working for you is because
json.dumps() automatically writes to the file; That is the purpose of the method.
You're writing to the program is indicating that whatever json.dumps returns is what will get written to the file...
You should use json.dump | Is writes to the file intaking a dictionary instead!
So I was trying to learn the function open which is apparently easy to use. I copied a really simple code from a website to just open and read a file called "test.txt" with some text on it. I tried it both ways, not specifying the path (since it's in the same folder) and calling the whole path. None worked (FileNotFoundError). It's all in a server so that might be the problem but I'd still like a short explanation if that is the problem.
Go easy on the vocabulary please, I'm just taking the first steps.
On the image I tried to stack as much info as posible: link.
handle = open("test.txt")
data = handle.read()
print(data)
handle.close()
SOLUTION: I actually just removed the .txt from the text file. Now it's name is test and it is a text file and the code works. I previously moved the python file and text file from the server to the computer since a comment said it could be the problem, but after finding my solution i put it all back in the server and the program runs as well.
You are trying to open a file that is located on a network share (\\Servidor\profiles$\...) and you are accessing it by using the \\<server>\<sharename> syntax and not mounted as a Windows drive letter.
Some things you could try:
Copy the data from the network share to some local directory on your machine and run your script again.
Try mounting the network share under a "drive letter" and run again using this drive letter.
Try this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/7170008/8745384 if you really need to access it on the network share.
Programming beginner here. So for my very first project I was able to make a quick python script that downloaded files from this website:
http://www.wesm.ph/inner.php/downloads/market_prices_&_schedules
I noticed that the link address of the to-be-downloaded file
followed a pattern.
(http://wesm.ph/admin/downloads/download.php?download=../csv/mpas/XXXXX/XXXX.csv)
With some string concatenation and using the datetime module, I was able to create the HTML string of the csv file. After which, I just would use the:
urllib.request.urlopen(HTMLlink).read()
and save it with something like:
with open('output.csv', "w", newline='') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f)
writer.writerows(fullList)
It used to work - now it doesn't. I noticed however whenever I clicked the 'Generate Report' button and THEN run the script, the script would generate the output file. I'm not sure why this works. Is there a way to send a request to their server to generate the actual file? Which module, or commands should I use?
Most likely those files are only temporarily stored on that webserver after you click 'Generate Report'.
In order to grenerate new ones, there might even be a check (in JavaScript or using Cookies, Session-ID), to see if the generation of the new link/file is asked from a human, or a bot.
You might also want to check the HTTP return code (or even the full returned headers to see what exactly the server is answering).
I'm having the idea of writing a program using Python which shall find a lyric of a song whose name I provided. I think the whole process should boil down to couple of things below. These are what I want the program to do when I run it:
prompt me to enter a name of a song
copy that name
open a web browser (google chrome for example)
paste that name in the address bar and find information about the song
open a page that contains the lyrics
copy that lyrics
run a text editor (like Microsoft Word for instance)
paste the lyrics
save the new text file with the name of the song
I am not asking for code, of course. I just want to know the concepts or ideas about how to use python to interact with other programs
To be more specific, I think I want to know, fox example, just how we point out where is the address bar in Google Chrome and tell python to paste the name there. Or how we tell python how to copy the lyrics as well as paste it into the Microsof Word's sheet then save it.
I've been reading (I'm still reading) several books on Python: Byte of python, Learn python the hard way, Python for dummies, Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame. However, I found out that it seems like I only (or almost only) learn to creat programs that work on itself (I can't tell my program to do things I want with other programs that are already installed on my computer)
I know that my question somehow sounds rather silly, but I really want to know how it works, the way we tell Python to regconize that this part of the Google chrome browser is the address bar and that it should paste the name of the song in it. The whole idea of making python interact with another program is really really vague to me and I just
extremely want to grasp that.
Thank you everyone, whoever spend their time reading my so-long question.
ttriet204
If what you're really looking into is a good excuse to teach yourself how to interact with other apps, this may not be the best one. Web browsers are messy, the timing is going to be unpredictable, etc. So, you've taken on a very hard task—and one that would be very easy if you did it the usual way (talk to the server directly, create the text file directly, etc., all without touching any other programs).
But if you do want to interact with other apps, there are a variety of different approaches, and which is appropriate depends on the kinds of apps you need to deal with.
Some apps are designed to be automated from the outside. On Windows, this nearly always means they a COM interface, usually with an IDispatch interface, for which you can use pywin32's COM wrappers; on Mac, it means an AppleEvent interface, for which you use ScriptingBridge or appscript; on other platforms there is no universal standard. IE (but probably not Chrome) and Word both have such interfaces.
Some apps have a non-GUI interface—whether that's a command line you can drive with popen, or a DLL/SO/DYLIB you can load up through ctypes. Or, ideally, someone else has already written Python bindings for you.
Some apps have nothing but the GUI, and there's no way around doing GUI automation. You can do this at a low level, by crafting WM_ messages to send via pywin32 on Windows, using the accessibility APIs on Mac, etc., or at a somewhat higher level with libraries like pywinauto, or possibly at the very high level of selenium or similar tools built to automate specific apps.
So, you could do this with anything from selenium for Chrome and COM automation for Word, to crafting all the WM_ messages yourself. If this is meant to be a learning exercise, the question is which of those things you want to learn today.
Let's start with COM automation. Using pywin32, you directly access the application's own scripting interfaces, without having to take control of the GUI from the user, figure out how to navigate menus and dialog boxes, etc. This is the modern version of writing "Word macros"—the macros can be external scripts instead of inside Word, and they don't have to be written in VB, but they look pretty similar. The last part of your script would look something like this:
word = win32com.client.dispatch('Word.Application')
word.Visible = True
doc = word.Documents.Add()
doc.Selection.TypeText(my_string)
doc.SaveAs(r'C:\TestFiles\TestDoc.doc')
If you look at Microsoft Word Scripts, you can see a bunch of examples. However, you may notice they're written in VBScript. And if you look around for tutorials, they're all written for VBScript (or older VB). And the documentation for most apps is written for VBScript (or VB, .NET, or even low-level COM). And all of the tutorials I know of for using COM automation from Python, like Quick Start to Client Side COM and Python, are written for people who already know about COM automation, and just want to know how to do it from Python. The fact that Microsoft keeps changing the name of everything makes it even harder to search for—how would you guess that googling for OLE automation, ActiveX scripting, Windows Scripting House, etc. would have anything to do with learning about COM automation? So, I'm not sure what to recommend for getting started. I can promise that it's all as simple as it looks from that example above, once you do learn all the nonsense, but I don't know how to get past that initial hurdle.
Anyway, not every application is automatable. And sometimes, even if it is, describing the GUI actions (what a user would click on the screen) is simpler than thinking in terms of the app's object model. "Select the third paragraph" is hard to describe in GUI terms, but "select the whole document" is easy—just hit control-A, or go to the Edit menu and Select All. GUI automation is much harder than COM automation, because you either have to send the app the same messages that Windows itself sends to represent your user actions (e.g., see "Menu Notifications") or, worse, craft mouse messages like "go (32, 4) pixels from the top-left corner, click, mouse down 16 pixels, click again" to say "open the File menu, then click New".
Fortunately, there are tools like pywinauto that wrap up both kinds of GUI automation stuff up to make it a lot simpler. And there are tools like swapy that can help you figure out what commands you want to send. If you're not wedded to Python, there are also tools like AutoIt and Actions that are even easier than using swapy and pywinauto, at least when you're getting started. Going this way, the last part of your script might look like:
word.Activate()
word.MenuSelect('File->New')
word.KeyStrokes(my_string)
word.MenuSelect('File->Save As')
word.Dialogs[-1].FindTextField('Filename').Select()
word.KeyStrokes(r'C:\TestFiles\TestDoc.doc')
word.Dialogs[-1].FindButton('OK').Click()
Finally, even with all of these tools, web browsers are very hard to automate, because each web page has its own menus, buttons, etc. that aren't Windows controls, but HTML. Unless you want to go all the way down to the level of "move the mouse 12 pixels", it's very hard to deal with these. That's where selenium comes in—it scripts web GUIs the same way that pywinauto scripts Windows GUIs.
The following script uses Automa to do exactly what you want (tested on Word 2010):
def find_lyrics():
print 'Please minimize all other open windows, then enter the song:'
song = raw_input()
start("Google Chrome")
# Disable Google's autocompletion and set the language to English:
google_address = 'google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en'
write(google_address, into="Address")
press(ENTER)
write(song + ' lyrics filetype:txt')
click("I'm Feeling Lucky")
press(CTRL + 'a', CTRL + 'c')
press(ALT + F4)
start("Microsoft Word")
press(CTRL + 'v')
press(CTRL + 's')
click("Desktop")
write(song + ' lyrics', into="File name")
click("Save")
press(ALT + F4)
print("\nThe lyrics have been saved in file '%s lyrics' "
"on your desktop." % song)
To try it out for yourself, download Automa.zip from its Download page and unzip into, say, c:\Program Files. You'll get a folder called Automa 1.1.2. Run Automa.exe in that folder. Copy the code above and paste it into Automa by right-clicking into the console window. Press Enter twice to get rid of the last ... in the window and arrive back at the prompt >>>. Close all other open windows and type
>>> find_lyrics()
This performs the required steps.
Automa is a Python library: To use it as such, you have to add the line
from automa.api import *
to the top of your scripts and the file library.zip from Automa's installation directory to your environment variable PYTHONPATH.
If you have any other questions, just let me know :-)
Here's an implementation in Python of #Matteo Italia's comment:
You are approaching the problem from a "user perspective" when you
should approach it from a "programmer perspective"; you don't need to
open a browser, copy the text, open Word or whatever, you need to
perform the appropriate HTTP requests, parse the relevant HTML,
extract the text and write it to a file from inside your Python
script. All the tools to do this are available in Python (in
particular you'll need urllib2 and BeautifulSoup).
#!/usr/bin/env python
import codecs
import json
import sys
import urllib
import urllib2
import bs4 # pip install beautifulsoup4
def extract_lyrics(page):
"""Extract lyrics text from given lyrics.wikia.com html page."""
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(page)
result = []
for tag in soup.find('div', 'lyricbox'):
if isinstance(tag, bs4.NavigableString):
if not isinstance(tag, bs4.element.Comment):
result.append(tag)
elif tag.name == 'br':
result.append('\n')
return "".join(result)
# get artist, song to search
artist = raw_input("Enter artist:")
song = raw_input("Enter song:")
# make request
query = urllib.urlencode(dict(artist=artist, song=song, fmt="realjson"))
response = urllib2.urlopen("http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?" + query)
data = json.load(response)
if data['lyrics'] != 'Not found':
# print short lyrics
print(data['lyrics'])
# get full lyrics
lyrics = extract_lyrics(urllib2.urlopen(data['url']))
# save to file
filename = "[%s] [%s] lyrics.txt" % (data['artist'], data['song'])
with codecs.open(filename, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as output_file:
output_file.write(lyrics)
print("written '%s'" % filename)
else:
sys.exit('not found')
Example
$ printf "Queen\nWe are the Champions" | python get-lyrics.py
Output
I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime
And bad mistakes
I've made a few
I've had my share of sand kicked [...]
written '[Queen] [We are the Champions] lyrics.txt'
If you really want to open a browser, etc, look at selenium. But that's overkill for your purposes. Selenium is used to simulate button clicks, etc for testing the appearance of websites on various browsers, etc. Mechanize is less of an overkill for this
What you really want to do is understand how a browser (or any other program) works under the hood i.e. when you click on the mouse or type on the keyboard or hit Save, what does the program do behind the scenes? It is this behind-the-scenes work that you want your python code to do.
So, use urllib, urllib2 or requests (or heck, even scrapy) to request a web page (learn how to put together the url to a google search or the php GET request of a lyrics website). Google also has a search API that you can take advantage of, to perform a google search.
Once you have your results from your page request, parse it with xml, beautifulsoup, lxlml, etc and find the section of the request result that has the information you're after.
Now that you have your lyrics, the simplest thing to do is open a text file and dump the lyrics in there and write to disk. But if you really want to do it with MS Word, then open a doc file in notepad or notepad++ and look at its structure. Now, use python to build a document with similar structure, wherein the content will be the downloaded lyrics.
If this method fails, you could look into pywinauto or such to automate the pasting of text into an MS Word doc and clicking on Save
Citation: Matteo Italia, g.d.d.c from the comments on the OP
You should look into a package called selenium for interacting with web browsers
How can I see script errors for my python MIDI Remote Scripts in Ableton Live? I've seen references online to a hidden Python console, but no documentation on how to open it, if it would even help me!
Currently I type code, reload the script, and see what happens. If nothing happens, then something is wrong. Very tedious...
Edit: I should also point out that there isn't anything useful in the Log.txt file either, yet that file is being updated.
To debug the control surface, you can define your own log method like so:
def log(self, message):
sys.stderr.write("LOG: " + message.encode("utf-8"))
Usage example:
year = 1999
self.log("I'm gonna party like it's " + str(year))
This will append
21179419 ms. RemoteScriptError: LOG: Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999
to your Log.txt.
Also, it may be worth knowing that (at least as of Live 9.1) edited control surface files are recompiled every time you load a new song, no need to restart the application.
EDIT: changed the stderr write method so that it doesn't write two lines and an extra return for every log
I use the log.txt for a ton of debugging. It is a little hard to read, but here's my tips.
log writes top down (new info is on next line) and records all the events, more or less.
If you get an error you will get a large hex looking block - about 20+ lines looking like this:
280 ms. Exception: 0x00495580:0x00000000
Right above that block is the error or what may have thrown the script in the Ableton run time.
As you travel UP from that exception you will see something like a trace.
also - you can use :
self.log_message("STUFF")
to write into the log (there are other methods).
I have seen some log file parsers (real time) in my work. Not tried them yet.
Hope that hleps a little. O was ablt to write a PHP app for the python (yeah, sinful I know). http://modrn.dj/app
For the sake of completeness: on Mac OS X 10.9, the Log.txt file is in
/Users/-username-/Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 9.1/
The Live 9.1 folder may of course be different for different versions of Live.
Note the Library folder is hidden. It took me a while to figure that out. An easy way to access it with Finder: click the Go menu item, then hold Alt and the Library folder will pop into the menu
what about http://remotescripts.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html
This has certainly changed over the years with different versions of Ableton Live.
I'm running Live 8 and first tried to get the LiveAPI stuff to spit out debug information: http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=4607&page=1
I started with an older version that didn't work with OSX, reported here: http://code.google.com/p/liveapi/issues/detail?id=4 I don't think the new version includes the telnet console.
SO, the best answer is to find a log file here, which contains debug information on a problematic MIDI Remote Scripts:
Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live 8.2.1/Log.txt
You can also use http://julienbayle.net/ableton-live-9-midi-remote-scripts for Ableton Live 9