I want to email out a document that will be filled in by many people and emailed back to me. I will then parse the responses using Python and load them into my database.
What is the best format to send out the initial document in?
I was thinking an interactive .pdf but do not want to have to pay for Adobe XI. Alternatively maybe a .html file but I'm not sure how easy it is to save the state of it once its been filled in in order to be emailed back to me. A .xls file may also be a solution but I'm leaning away from it simply because it would not be a particularly professional looking format.
The key points are:
Answers can be easily parsed using Python
The format should common enough to open on most computers
The document should look relatively pleasing to the eye
Send them a web-page with a FORM section, complete with some Javascript to grab the contents of the controls and send them to you (e.g. in JSON format) when they press "submit".
Another option is to set it up as a web application. There are several Python web frameworks that could be used for that. You could then e-mail people a link to the web-app.
Why don't you use Google Docs for the form. Create the form in Google Docs and save the answer in an excel sheet. And then use any python Excel format reader (Google them) to read the file. This way you don't need to parse through mails and will be performance friendly too. Or you could just make a simple form using AppEngine and save the data directly to the database.
Related
For a Python web project (with Django) I developed a tool that generates an XLSX file. For questions of ergonomics and ease for users I would like to integrate this excel on my HTML page.
So I first thought of converting the XLSX to an HTML array, with the xlsx2html python library. It works but since I can’t determine the desired size for my cells or trim the content during conversion, I end up with huge cells and tiny text..
I found an interesting way with the html tag associated with OneDrive to embed an excel window into a web page, but my file being in my code and not on Excel Online I cannot import it like that. Yet the display is perfect and I don’t need the user to interact with this table.
I have searched a lot for other methods but apart from developing a function to browse my file and generate the script of the html table line by line, I have the feeling that I cannot simply use a method to convert or display it on my web page.
I am not accustomed to this need and wonder if there would not be a cleaner method to display an excel file in html.
Does it make sense to develop a function that builds my html table script in str? Or should I find a library that does it? Maybe there is a specific Django library ?
Thank you for your experience
I've come across an assignment which requires me to extract tabular data from images in a pdf file to neatly formatted dataframes via python code. There are several files to be processed and the relevant pages in all the files the may have different page numbers, hence the sequence of steps for this problem (my assumption) are:
Navigate to relevant section of the pdf
Extract images of the tabular data
Extract data from the images, format and convert to dataframes.
Some google searches resulted in me finding libraries for pdf text extraction, table extraction and more - modular solutions only.
I would appreciate some help in this regard. What packages should I use? Is my approach correct?
Can I get references to any helpful code snippets for similar problems?
page structure of the required tables
This started as a comment. I believe the answer is valid as it is in no way an endorsement of the service. I don't even use it. I know Azure uses SO as well.
This is the stuff of commercial services. You can try Azure Form Recognizer (with which I am not affiliated):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/applied-ai-services/form-recognizer
Here are some python examples of how to use it:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/applied-ai-services/form-recognizer/how-to-guides/try-sdk-rest-api?pivots=programming-language-python
The AWS equivalent is Textract https://aws.amazon.com/textract
The Google Cloud version is called Form Parser - see https://cloud.google.com/document-ai/docs/processors-list#processor_form-parser
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but I not exactly sure where is the right place to pose this issue.
I'm being asked to make a web page or spread sheet with a table of PDFs and add a button where each PDF can be attached to an email. As in, a one-click solution to add the actual PDF into an email, not a link to the file. I don't think this is possible since the file is hosted on the web... BUT...
If the file is hosted locally on our internal server is there a code or function that would be able to do that?
Basically, the company owner is old and doesn't want to have to search for files to add to emails. He wants to just be able to open a list (web, excel, whatever), click on the one(s) he wants, and have them add to an email. I need to be able to manage and update the PDF files on the back end and update the table.
Of course the easy thing is to have a shared folder, but it lacks organization of an easily readable table. Alternately, he want to attach the actual file, not send a link.
I can't think of a way to do this, but plenty of people are smarter than I.
And advice or help is appreciated.
Seeking a bit of guidance on a general approach as to how one would automate the retrieval of data from a My Google Map. While I could easily export any given layer to KML/KMZ, I'm looking for a way to do this within a larger script, that will automate the process. Preferably, where I wouldn't even have to log in to the map itself to complete the data pull.
So, what do you think the best approach is? Two possible options I'm considering are 1) using selenium/beautiful soup to simulate page-clicks on Google Maps and export the KMZ or 2) making use of Python Google Maps API. Though, I'm not sure if this API makes it possible to download Google Maps layer via a script.
To be clear, the data is already in the map - I'm just looking for a way to export it. It could either be a KMZ export, or better yet, GeoJSON.
Any thoughts or advice welcome! Thank you in advance.
I used my browser’s inspection feature to figure out what was going on under the hood with the website I was interested in grabbing data from, which led me to this solution.
I use Selenium to login and navigate said website, then transfer my cookies to Python’s Requests package. I have Requests send a specific query to the server whose response is in the form of JSON. I was able to figure out what query to send and what form the response would be through the inspection feature previously stated. Once I have the response in JSON I use Python’s JSON package to convert into a Python dict to use however I need.
Sounds like you might not necessarily need Selenium but it does sound like the Requests package would be useful to your use case. I think your first step is figuring out what form the server response is when you interact with the website naturally to get what you want.
Hopefully this helps to some degree!
Let me provide a little background.
An organization i am volunteering for delivers meals to people who are unable to come pick them up during the holidays.
They currently have a SQL Server DB that stores the information of all their clients along with the meal information for each year.
Currently a Java desktop application connects to the SQL Server DB and allows several functions to happen.
i.e. Add a client, add meals, remove clients, print delivery sheets.
I am hoping to use python Flask to rewrite the application as a web based application. The one function i am interested in at the moment is the print delivery sheets function.
The way this works is there is a setting for the current year. When you click the print deliveries for year button it will batch print a document for each customer onto an 8.5" x 11.5" paper. The sheet will be split in two with the same exact information on each side. This information includes the customer name, address, number of meals and so forth.
What i am wondering is how/what would be the best way to setup this template so that i could batch print it using python. I was thinking of creating an html template for the page but i am not sure how that would work.
Again i need to pass in every customer within that year into the template and batch print to 8.5" by 11.5" sheet.
What i am asking is.....
How could i create a template for the print that i can pass every customer two.
How would i print that template for every customer in a batch manner for every customer.
I was hoping to do this all in python if possible.
Thank you for your time and help.
If you are already deploying this as a web app, it will probably be easier to design and generate a pdf. You can use an html to pdf converter, which there are several of on PyPI, or there are plenty of resources online, such as:
How to convert webpage into PDF by using Python
https://www.smallsurething.com/how-to-generate-pdf-reports-with-jinja2-and-pyqt/
Once you have found a way to generate PDFs, you can then just use them like any other PDF, and either have the user download them or print them from the browser (this may require a little bit of Javascript, but this shouldn't be that hard since it should pretty much just be a window.open call.
For instance, you can add a button
<button onclick="getPDF()">Download PDF</button>
Which will then call a function called getPDF() which you define, which finds a way to generate the pdf.
function getPDF() {
// Find the uri for the pdf by some method
var urlToPdf = getUrlToPdf();
// Open PDF in new window
window.open(urlToPdf, "_blank");
}
Note Since you are using Flask, you can include the URL for the pdf in the source for the page, even the Javascript using the {{ }} syntax. Then the pdfs are only generated when someone requests that route.
This way you will not have to worry about connecting to a printer yourself at all, just use the browser to handle those kinds of tasks.