How can I convert a .csv file into .dbf file using a python script? I found this piece of code online but I'm not certain how reliable it is. Are there any modules out there that have this functionality?
Using the dbf package you can get a basic csv file with code similar to this:
import dbf
some_table = dbf.from_csv(csvfile='/path/to/file.csv', to_disk=True)
This will create table with the same name and either Character or Memo fields and field names of f0, f1, f2, etc.
For a different filename use the filenameparameter, and if you know your field names you can also use the field_names parameter.
some_table = dbf.from_csv(csvfile='data.csv', filename='mytable',
field_names='name age birth'.split())
Rather basic documentation is available here.
Disclosure: I am the author of this package.
You won't find anything on the net that reads a CSV file and writes a DBF file such that you can just invoke it and supply 2 file-paths. For each DBF field you need to specify the type, size, and (if relevant) number of decimal places.
Some questions:
What software is going to consume the output DBF file?
There is no such thing as "the" (one and only) DBF file format. Do you need dBase III ? dBase 4? 7? Visual FoxPro? etc?
What is the maximum length of text field that you need to write? Do you have non-ASCII text?
Which version of Python?
If your requirements are minimal (dBase III format, no non-ASCII text, text <= 254 bytes long, Python 2.X), then the cookbook recipe that you quoted should do the job.
Use the csv library to read your data from the csv file. The third-party dbf library can write a dbf file for you.
Edit: Originally, I listed dbfpy, but the library above seems to be more actively updated.
None that are well-polished, to my knowledge. I have had to work with xBase files many times over the years, and I keep finding myself writing code to do it when I have to do it. I have, somewhere in one of my backups, a pretty functional, pure-Python library to do it, but I don't know precisely where that is.
Fortunately, the xBase file format isn't all that complex. You can find the specification on the Internet, of course. At a glance the module that you linked to looks fine, but of course make copies of any data that you are working with before using it.
A solid, read/write, fully functional xBase library with all the bells and whistles is something that has been on my TODO list for a while... I might even get to it in what is left this year, if I'm lucky... (probably not, though, sadly).
I have created a python script here. It should be customizable for any csv layout. You do need to know your DBF data structure before this will be possible. This script requires two csv files, one for your DBF header setup and one for your body data. good luck.
https://github.com/mikebrennan/csv2dbf_python
Related
I want to read VFP vcx files as plaintext in python. Any tips on how I should go about it?
I understand that the mime type of the file is an octet stream, which is typically associated with binary files. Also apparent is that VFP uses vcx file in combination with vct files to display the initial Source code.
I have been trying some static code analysis methods to extract the information that I need from the vct file, but I had no luck since the control characters mess up even the legible parts of the vct file, which is very hard to automate.
I have searched for weeks. This is my last resort before going into VFP and scraping it manually.
Any help is mich appreciated.
You have a few options:
Fernando Bozzo's Foxbin is a github repository with some VFP code to convert vcx, scx ... to prg files.
In VFP tools menu there is View Class Code option
There is scctext that ships with VFP.
All the above generate VFP prg files which are text. But probably that is not what you meant. Then you could simply open a vcx as a table (it is a table with a vcx extension) and read all the object names, properties, methods and such.
I want to read VFP vcx files as plaintext in python
For what it's worth, *.vcx / *.vct files are just renamed dBase/xBase *.DBF/ *.FPT file pairs, just like *.scx \ *.sct VFP Form files. So you could probably use something like dbfread
Thanks for taking the time to read my question.
I am working on a personal project to learn python scripting for excel, and I want to learn how to move data from one workbook to another.
In this example, I am emulating a company employee ledger that has name, position, address, and more (The organizations is by row so every employee takes up one row). But the project is to have a selected number of people be transferred to a new ledger (another excel file). So I have a list of emails in a .txt file (it could even be another excel file but I thought .txt would be easier), and I would want the script to run through the .txt file, get the emails, and look for any rows that have a matching email address(all emails are in cell 'B'). And if any are found, then copy that entire row to the new excel file.
I tried a lot of ways to make this work, but I could not figure it out. I am really new to python so I am not even sure if this is possible. Would really appreciate some help!
You have essentially two packages that will allow manipulation of Excel files. For reading in data and performing analysis the standard package for use is pandas. You can save the files as .xlsx however you are only really working with base table data and not the file itself (IE, you are extracing data FROM the file, not working WITH the file)
However what you need is really to perform manipulation on Excel files directly which is better done with openpyxl
You can also read files (such as your text file) using with open function that is native to Python and is not a third party import like pandas or openpyxl.
Part of learning to program includes learning how to use documentation.
As such, here is the documentation you require with sufficient examples to learn openpyxl: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
And you can learn about pandas here: https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/index.html
And you can learn about python with open here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/inputoutput.html
Hope this helps.
EDIT: It's possible I or another person can give you a specific example using your data / code etc, but you would have to provide it fully. Since you're learning, I suggest using the documentation or youtube.
I want to enter data into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, and for that data to interact and write itself to other documents and webforms.
With success, I am pulling data from an Excel spreadsheet using xlwings. Right now, I’m stuck working with .docx files. The goal here is to write the Excel data into specific parts of a Microsoft Word .docx file template and create a new file.
My specific question is:
Can you modify just a text string(s) in a word/document.xml file and still maintain the integrity and functionality of its .docx encasement? It seems that there are numerous things that can change in the XML code when making even the slightest change to a Word document. I've been working with python-docx and lxml, but I'm not sure if what I seek to do is possible via this route.
Any suggestions or experiences to share would be greatly appreciated. I feel I've read every article that is easily discoverable through a google search at least 5 times.
Let me know if anything needs clarification.
Some things to note:
I started getting into coding about 2 months ago. I’ve been doing it intensively for that time and I feel I’m picking up the essential concepts, but there are severe gaps in my knowledge.
Here are my tools:
Yosemite 10.10,
Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac
You probably need to be more specific, but the short answer is, in principle, yes.
At a certain level, all python-docx does is modify strings in the XML. A couple things though:
The XML you create needs to remain well-formed and valid according to the schema. So if you change the text enclosed in a <w:t> element, for example, that works fine. Conversely, if you inject a bunch of random XML at an arbitrary point in one of the .xml parts, that will corrupt the file.
The XML "files", known as parts that make up a .docx file are contained in a Zip archive known as a package. You must unpackage and repackage that set of parts properly in order to have a valid .docx file afterward. python-docx takes care of all those details for you, but if you're going directly at the .docx file you'll need to take care of that yourself.
I have one text file called "actors.txt" and "actresses.txt". This files weight 200MB and 100MB. I want save the content in a db doing "import shelve". The content is organized of the next way:
Last name, first name, films date, role
And I want to save this information for running various queries, for example, make a function that given an actor, will print all his movies.
I tried different's ways like:
filename_actors=('actors.txt')
database_actores=shelve.open(filename_actors)
But it doesn't work. How do I do it?
Shelve is a terrible module (both slow and insecure), and you should never use it.
If you're looking for an easy-to-use in-memory (or file-backed) database that's part of the Python standard library, take a look at the sqlite3 module: http://docs.python.org/2/library/sqlite3.html
It's rock solid, powerful (it's a full-fledged SQL database), well-documented and remarkably fast.
EDIT: Also, as #roippi said, to actually read your files, you'll need to use the csv module: http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html
I have a .rtf file that contains nothing but an integer, say 15. I wish to read this integer in through python and manipulate that integer in some way. However, it seems that python is reading in much of the metadata associated with .rtf files. Why is that? How can I avoid it? For example, trying to read in this file, I get..
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf949\cocoasubrtf460
{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss\fcharset0
Helvetica;}
{\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;}
\margl720\margr720\margb720\margt720\vieww9000\viewh8400\viewkind0
\pard\tx566\tx1133\tx1700\tx2267\tx2834\tx3401\tx3968\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6236\tx6803\ql\qnatural\pardirnatural
That's the nature of .RTF (i.e Rich Text files), they include extra data to define how the text is layed-out and formated.
It is not recommended to store data in such files lest you encounter the difficulties you noted. Would you go through the effort to parse this file and "recover" your one numeric value, you may expose your application to the risk of updated versions of the RTF format which may render the parsing logic partially incorrect and hence yield wrong numeric data for the application).
Why not store this info in a true text file. This could be a flat text file or preferably an XML, YAML, JSON file for example for added "forward" compatibility as your application and you may add extra parameters and such in the file.
If this file is a given, however, there probably exist Python libraries to read and write to it. Check the Python Package Index (PyPI) for the RTF keyword.
That's exactly what the RTF file contains, so Python (in the absence of further instruction) is giving you what the file contains.
You may be looking for a library to read the contents of RTF files, such as pyrtf-ng.