Programming is Awesome
oh yes it isThe Problem
Alright, so I’m teaching Human Geography in the fall, and the textbook I’m using has a bunch of online resources for instructors, like pre-made powerpoint lectures and slides of all the pictures in the book. It’s pretty awesome. I went to go download those things though and I ran into a problem. The publisher’s web dev guy made the links wrong.
You see, there are 4 categories of things to download: Lectures, Image Lectures, Book Images, and Unlabeled Book Images. Problem was, only the first and last two options had the correct links where I could download all of the files for all 18 chapters in one go. I absolutely refused to click on 36 links to download 36 files, that I could only do 2 at a time anyway because their system has some restrictions on it apparently. So I decided to program!
What I Did
What I wanted to do wasn’t all that hard. First, I had to see how the links were structured. Because they did this thing right, the .zip files were all in order, nice and neat. The URL structure looked something like this (with the actual URL and book info obscured because of reasons):
http://media.URL.com/digital_assets_table/BOOK_TITLE/image_ppts/01_imageppt.zip
So I opened up the python IDLE and pulled out this magic (after a little googling, of course, to get the .zfill() and urllib.request.urlretrieve() functions and syntax):
>>> import urllib.request
>>> span = range(1,18)
>>> url = 'http://media.URL.com/digital_assets_table/malinowski_1e/image_ppts/'
>>> suffix = '_imageppt.zip'
>>> for sp in span:
sp = str(sp).zfill(2)
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url + sp + suffix)
It paused for a second–which means I knew it was working–and then it burped out 18 lines that looked similar to this…
('c:\\users\\nathan~1\\appdata\\local\\temp\\tmpn14acl.zip',
<http.client.HTTPMessage object at 0x00000000034D7908>)
…and I went ahhhhhhhhhh crap. That’s what I get though for running this in the IDLE and not saving the script in the directory I wanted all these zips in anyway. Oh well, it wasn’t too much of a bother to go to that folder and nab all those files. Certainly much less than clicking on a shit-ton of links, that’s for sure.
What I’ll Do Next Time
Line 2 there is superfluous, doing something like
>>> for x in range(1,18):
works just as well. Except that I just realized that the range() function is not inclusive, so gotta bump the number up to 19. Now to manually download chapter 18’s files. Oh, and I’d save the script as a file first so I don’t have to go hunting down tmp files.
But look at that, only three things! This is why programming is awesome.
Tell me why you think programming is awesome: @thunderchao.
