Spreadsheet to Wikia template?

mittfh · 06-24-2012, 05:32 AM

I have a spreadsheet containing a list of episode summaries for an ongoing (text) web serial, which I'd like to wikify (in the hope that a wiki format may be more 'accessible' for other readers to contribute than a spreadsheet!)

I've created a Wikia template, the parameters of which are below (abridged for the purposes of this post - it actually has eight fields):

Code:

{{events
|episode=
|date=
|title=
|events=
}}

Now, obviously I can export the spreadsheet as a csv, but then comes the problem of converting:

Code:

"a1","a2","a3","a4"
"b1","b2","b3","b4"

and so on

to:

Code:

{{events
|episode=a1
|date=a2
|title=a3
|events=a4
}}
{{events
|episode=b1
|date=b2
|title=b3
|events=b4
}}

and so on.

The basic algorithm would presumably be along the lines of taking each line in turn, extracting everything between the "," character sequence to an array, then appending it to a text file together with the rest of the wiki markup. I'd obviously test it on a small (say, 10 episode) extract before subjecting it to the full 1,200 (which I'd probably split over multiple pages of about 100 episodes each for convenience).

The text extraction is probably the most complicated aspect, together with writing the output to file (unless done in shell script with echos and >>s).

I know the basics of programming, but it's been about a decade since I did any (Java, for a Computer Science degree, unhelpfully using custom file IO classes built by the uni).

So what would be your recommendations for an appropriate language to use to write this code (e.g. shell script / perl / python / other), and could you share either the relevant operators or a useful language reference so I can swot up myself?

Nominal Animal · 06-24-2012, 11:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mittfh

So what would be your recommendations for an appropriate language to use to write this code

I'd use awk. CSV parsing is, as you surmised, pretty difficult/annoying to do in a robust manner, but I've shown one working approach here. That one is basically an awk skeleton which parses the CSV data (RFC 4180), each line into an awk record, and each field into an awk field. It should handle quoted commas et cetera correctly. You might wish to use RS = "(\r\n|\n\r|\r|\n)" to allow any newline convention, though.

After the skeleton part of that script (as "user rules"), you'd only need an output rule, something along the lines of

Code:

{    printf("{{events\n|episode=%s\n|date=%s|title=%s|events=%s}}\n", $1, $2, $3, $4) }

To save the output to a file, just redirect the output to a file.

mittfh · 06-25-2012, 03:45 PM

Thanks for that - I've bookmarked the two threads and will have a go later this week, when I'm feeling less tired