Recently in work I had to generate a long list of html links from two columns that I had extracted from a MySQL database to a .csv file. The example below shows what steps are needed to generate html urls from a csv file that has the text of the link in one column and the url in the other. The columns that I extracted from the database into a .csv file looked like the following:
Master of Arts in Learning | https://testurl.com/courseid=123 |
Postgraduate Diploma in Arts | https://testurl.com/courseid=127 |
Postgraduate Diploma in Computing | https://testurl.com/courseid=128 |
In the file, there were roughly 400 rows. I needed to add the name of the courses with their link to a website as a list. The list created would allow students to browse for their course and follow the correct link to their course.
I had access to the html so I needed to add roughly 400 html links. To do this manually would take hours. So I decided I would need a script to produce the html. The script I came up with looks like the below:
import csv, sys
sys.stdout = open(‘links.txt’ , ‘w’)
for row in csv.reader(open(‘courses.csv’),delimiter=”,”):
print (”'<a href =\””’+ row[1] + ”'”>”’ + row[0] + ‘ </a> </br>’)
sys.stdout.close()
- Line one in the script; Import csv, sys. imports modules that I needed. The csv module facilitates the opening of .csv files while the sys module allows the redirection of output to a file.
- The second line; sys.stdout = open(‘links.txt’ , ‘w’) Creates and opens a file in write mode called links.txt.
- Line three, is a for loop, that opens the courses.csv file and goes through it line by line.
- As the loop goes through the file line by line, it prints <a href =” and then the contents of the second column (The URL). Then it prints the closing bracket for the tag. Next we print what is in column 1, the close </a> tag and finally a </br> tag which will insure that each link exists on a new line on our webpage.
When we run our script the output produced to the links.txt looks like:
<a href =”https://testurl.com/courseid=123″> Master of Arts in Learning</a></br>
<a href =” https://testurl.com/courseid=127″> Post Graduate Diploma in Arts</a></br>
<a href =”https://testurl.com/courseid=128″> Post Graduate Diploma in Computing</a></br>
This code can then be copied to our website which will then display a list of links that users can select.