DEV Community: Geof

How To Rename Multiple Files In Python

Geof — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 09:54:29 +0000

Ever wondered if you could rename files in python programmatically without the hassles of picking them one by one?

These days web developers tends to make downloadable contents difficult to scrape or download in bulk automatically, which in return makes these downloadable contents titles look funny and somewhat long, with all the hashes and etc.

So I downloaded the full season 5 of vikings, one of my favorite series. I felt the need to shorten the titles so I can easily select and watch some episodes on my phone when am less busy.

I had to do it in a such a way that the episode numbers will not be altered as well. So my purpose was clear:

Reduce the length of the titles
Retain the file extension(.mp4)
Retain the season numbers, symbols and episode numbers

So I came up with a simple reusable function which I will use that time and subsequent times. So in this post am going to share with you the codes and modules used.

ENOUGH STORIES! LET’S CODE:

We will begin by importing the necessary modules:

import os
from pprint import pprint

Yes that’s it! Just two modules is all we need, then we write our function. First let’s print out all the .mp4 files in our intended directory:

def rename_all():
    path = input('Please enter your folder path')
    files = os.listdir(path)
    for file in files:
        if file.endswith('.mp4'):
            print(file)

You will get an output like the following one:

Vikings - S05E01 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E03 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E04 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E09 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E18 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E19 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E20 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E17 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E16 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E15 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E13 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E14 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E12 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E11 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E10 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E08 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E07 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E06 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4
Vikings - S05E05 HD (TvShows4Mobile.Com).mp4

According to our purpose for this function we need to do away with ‘Vikings –‘ and ‘(TvShows4Mobile.Com)‘ and leave only the rest alongside with the extension. Something like this: ‘S05E07 HD.mp4‘.

That’s where our programming sense comes in play:

Firstly we need to know how to rename in python, there are a couple of options for that but in this post we will just use os.rename(). Then how do we make sure we do it in bulk without running into issues?

Since the os.rename() function takes in two parameters, source and destination, and they can all be strings. Then we will enter the files absolute path in source and slice the path to our intended result on the destination parameter.

# Rename multiple files in python
import os
from pprint import pprint

def rename_all():
    path = input('Please enter your folder path')
    files = os.listdir(path)
    for file in files:
        if file.endswith('.mp4'):
            os.rename(path+file, path+file[10:19]+'.mp4')
    print('Done renaming')
    pprint(os.listdir(path))

rename_all()

After running the function you will get an output like the following one:

Done renaming
['S05E03 HD.mp4',
 'S05E04 HD.mp4',
 'S05E09 HD.mp4',
 'S05E18 HD.mp4',
 'S05E19 HD.mp4',
 'S05E20 HD.mp4',
 'S05E17 HD.mp4',
 'S05E16 HD.mp4',
 'S05E15 HD.mp4',
 'S05E13 HD.mp4',
 'S05E14 HD.mp4',
 'S05E12 HD.mp4',
 'S05E11 HD.mp4',
 'S05E10 HD.mp4',
 'S05E08 HD.mp4',
 'S05E07 HD.mp4',
 'S05E06 HD.mp4',
 'S05E05 HD.mp4',
 'S05E01 HD.mp4']

So we sliced and added back our extension, and used the pprint to print our files in a nice order. Meanwhile there is no episode 2 because 1 is joined with 2.

Important Note: when entering your folder path, make sure you close it with a slash, forward or otherwise(according to your PC operating system), otherwise you will get an error.

Your slicing pattern or numbers might be different depending on the length of the episode title.

I hope you enjoyed this post, you have learnt one of the ways to rename files in python.

Also if you are beginner am guessing you have also learnt a few other stuffs like: slicing, .endswith, os.rename and etc.

If you have questions , please don’t hesitate to ask me in the comment section.

To also see more codes similar to how to rename files in python kindly check my free tutorial posts page.

HOW TO SHRED A FILE IN PYTHON

Geof — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 16:46:30 +0000

Except you are into tech or you are one of those curious minds, you’d probably think that hitting the delete button permanently deletes a file in your hard-drive or any other storage device.

Yes! you heard right and am not talking about restoring files from the recycle bin, am talking about the files that has been deleted even from the recycle bin.

As scary as it sounds, those pretty sensitive private data in that USB you gave out on last boxing-day, which you took your precious time to delete can actually be restored using tools like testdisk.

Now the question is how do you make sure that this data are permanently deleted beyond recovery? Ever heard of shredding? Yes there is a physical machine for that in the real world, but this time am talking about the digital shredding of those unwanted digital files within your computer.

If you use linux distro like ubuntu, there’s a package called shred and it’s shipped with ubuntu by default. You can just use it via the command-line interface(CLI).

There’re other packages for shredding like wipe, you can google for info on that

You can also shred a file using bash scripts but in this post we’ll use python, so if you are a python student or python enthusiast and you’d like to learn how to shred a file in python or even multiple files using python codes, then read on as we are going to get down to the business of the day.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ALREADY

To fully understand the following codes, you’d need to be familiar with some basic python concepts like :

Importing and using modules
For-loops
Scope
Function
Basic concepts like printing, fstring, python syntax and other similar stuffs

LET THE CODING BEGIN!

So we’ll begin by importing the necessary modules:

#let's import the modules we need
import glob
import os
import subprocess as sp

In other to successfully shred a file in python we need those imported modules above, however another programmer might also have his/her own way of going about it.

Meanwhile we’ll use glob and os to recursively navigate a given directory and its sub directories and perform our shredding. We’ll then use subprocess to run a command line operations via our python script.

Now let’s start writing our file shredding function:

def shrd():
    file_path = input('Enter the folder path:\n')

So we got the directory path from the user, next we write the code we will use to recursively search the entire directory and sub directory for matching files.

But first let’s see what happens when we don’t specify a specific file type. The code below will print the folders and files in an understandable manner.

gen = glob.iglob(f'{file_path}/**/*', recursive=True)
    for file in gen:
        print(file)

Now let’s write in full a code that checks the entire directory for all the .txt files and shred them:

import subprocess as sp
import os
import glob
def shrd():
    file_path = input('Enter the folder path:\n')
    file_type = input('Enter file type here:\n')
    gen = glob.iglob(f'{file_path}/**/*.{file_type}', recursive=True)
    for file in gen:
        print(f'shredding {file} now\n')
        sp.call(f'shred -zvu -n 10 {file}', shell = True)

        print(f'done shredding {file}, moving to the next file now...\n')

    print('Bravo! All files has been shredded')

shrd()

CODE EXPLAINED:

After getting and saving the directory path and file type in variables, we used glob module to find and delete all the .txt files recursively in the given directory.

We use subprocess to run a command line program(shred) via python script.

Now let me explain the extra arguments -zvu -n in the command:

-z or –zero add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
-u deallocate and remove file after overwriting
-v or –verbose show progress
-n or –iterations is for the overwrite N times instead of the default (3)
To see more arguments options use shred –help in the CLI. Meanwhile we didn’t want to name the function shred to avoid confusion on the code since the we are using the shred pkg, so we used shrd instead.

CONCLUSIONS

I hope you enjoyed the short tutorial and also learnt something new today. If you have questions , please don’t hesitate to ask me in the comment section.

Meanwhile, shred ordinarily shreds one file at a time but our function helps us to shred as many files as we want just by running our code.

Remember you can do this with any other file with another extension other than .txt, like mp3, mp4 and etc.

Now that you have learnt about how to navigate files in a given directory, you can actually do other incredible stuffs like searching for, bulk-delete, move and do other stuffs with files and folders using python.

To see more codes similar to how to shred a file in python kindly check our tutorial post page. You can also check this post if you are interested in seeing code with the glob module or file manipulation codes.

Web Scraping With Python

Geof — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 19:04:18 +0000

WHAT IS WEB SCRAPING?

In a nutshell, web scraping is the act of an automated extraction of publicly displayed data from the web which could not be reached nor extracted by the use of API.

Most times, the basic aim for for web scraping are usually for price or news monitoring, information/data gathering, automated research, automated web/platform engagements and similar events.

Web scraping has become very popular and important in recent times due to it’s relevance in the current business world. However, this tutorial is about web scraping with python, so without further ado we’ll dive into what web scraping with python looks like and the libraries needed to code a simple web scraper.

SCRAPING WITH SELENIUM

Python is widely known to be useful in many things in tech, but web scraping happens to be one of the major domains where python programming thrives.

WHAT IS SELENIUM?

Selenium is an umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries that enable and support the automation of web browsers.

It provides extensions to emulate user interaction with browsers, a distribution server for scaling browser allocation, and the infrastructure for implementations of the W3C WebDriver specification that lets you write interchangeable code for all major web browsers.

Meanwhile, selenium is not the only module used for web scraping with python, there are other major modules that are also as popular as selenium. However there are cons and pros for each of them, you just need to know the one you need at every occasion. We’ll discuss a brief comparison of these modules further on.

The 3 most popular python modules used for web scraping are as follows:

SCRAPY:

Scrapy is efficient and portable. However it’s major con is that it’s not user friendly, especially for beginners.

BEAUTIFUL SOUP:

Beautiful soup is easy to learn and understand. However it does have some cons too: Beautiful soup requires dependencies and it’s less efficient than Scrapy.

SELENIUM:

Selenium is versatile and also works well with javascript. However selenium is also not as efficient as scrapy.

In this post we’ll use selenium as our module for web scraping with python, perhaps in my next web scraping post we’ll adopt any of the other modules mentioned above.

TALK IS CHEAP, LET THE CODING BEGIN…

We are about to code a web scraper that will go to the popular wikipedia’s website and enter a query in the search box, get results and possibly links too. Make no mistakes there is a module specifically for wikipedia search called wikipedia.

However, the aim here is to show how one can access a public website, fill a form, submit it, explore the site contents and more. But we are just going to keep things simple on this particular post.

MY ASSUMPTIONS:

You have the basic experience of HTML and CSS
You have at least beginner’s basic python coding experience, for instance you are familiar with loops, functions, importing of modules and similar knowledge.
Meanwhile, if you have not used selenium before, please do yourself a favor, checkout the basic documentation of this module here before you continue with this tutorial.

Firstly, we’ll begin by importing the necessary modules. But before importing these modules you’d need to download your web browser’s web driver. I personally prefer google chrome driver.

Be sure that you downloaded the same version as the version of your browser, to check your browser version, click on the 3 dots on chrome and click on “help” then click on “about google chrome” right there you’ll see the version you are using.

Once you are done with the download, extract the file and keep it somewhere close to your code folder and note the path to the driver.

Now let’s import the necessary modules.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time
import requests
from pprint import pprint

Now it’s time to create our main function for this code:

def get_wiki():

    #get the preferred keyword
    keyword = input('Enter a keyword to search:\n')
    link_dec = input('Do you need links? Kindly enter yes or no:\n').lower()

    #create path instance and create the driver path
    d_path = Service('/home/you/Desktop/my_scraper/web_driver/chromedriver')
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(service = d_path)

Let’s explain the code above:

We created a function called get_wiki, now the variable keyword will get a keyword to search for from the user. link dec variable is for decision about needing links or not by the user.

Then we created the the driver path and the driver instance. Now we’ll continue with more codes inside the main function:

#get the page and enter a keyword to search
    driver.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page')
    search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, 'search')

    search_box.send_keys(keyword)
    search_box.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

    time.sleep(3)

    #get the main content
    main_data = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'content')
    pprint(main_data.text)

I presume you have checked out the selenium documentation as I advised earlier, and with your prior knowledge on HTML and CSS, you already know how to find the needed selectors and elements on the wikipedia page.

You can just open the website in a new window and explore the elements and selectors with chrome developers tools while simulating the search. This will enable you to check what is working and what’s not, in case you run into bugs.

So with the code above we’ll get the page and enter a keyword to search and press the search button. We wait for 3 seconds, get the results, and print them out using pprint.

Now let’s create an inner function inside the main function that will get the available links if required by the user:

def show_links():
        """Get the links available in the contents"""
        links = driver.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'a')
        for link in links:
            print(link.get_attribute('href'))

As you can see the function above is self explanatory. Next, we’ll call the function if the link_dec was “yes” and quit the driver, next we call the main function:

if link_dec == 'yes':
        show_links()
    else:
        pass

    driver.quit()

get_wiki()

Now let’s see all the codes in one place:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import time
import requests
from pprint import pprint


def get_wiki():

    #get the preferred keyword
    keyword = input('Enter a keyword to search:\n')
    link_dec = input('Do you need links? Kindly enter yes or no:\n').lower()

    #create path instance and create the driver path
    d_path = Service('/home/you/Desktop/my_scraper/web_driver/chromedriver')
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(service = d_path)


    #get the page and enter a keyword to search
    driver.get('https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page')
    search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, 'search')

    search_box.send_keys(keyword)
    search_box.send_keys(Keys.ENTER)

    time.sleep(3)

    #get the main content
    main_data = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'content')
    pprint(main_data.text)


    def show_links():
        """Get the links available in the contents"""
        links = driver.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, 'a')
        for link in links:
            print(link.get_attribute('href'))

    if link_dec == 'yes':
        show_links()
    else:
        pass

    driver.quit()

get_wiki()

CONCLUSION

From here you can do other things with your search results, like sending them to an email address, converting them to pdf file and more.

In my next web scraping with python post, we’ll focus more on other cools stuffs like getting prices and updates on news, trading and more. We’ll also learn about beautiful soup, regex, sending emails with python and more.

You can edit this code and use it on different sites or search engine like google. Now that you have the basic knowledge, you can explore selenium even more, create better scrapers than what I did here.

Becoming better in anything requires curiosity, so get curious and explore the available knowledge on the internet about web scraping, you might want to check the popular programming communities for extra knowledge on the topic.

To automatically get notification when my next post on web scraping with python and subsequent ones gets published, hit the follow button.

Get an affordable and seamless python one on one training today from anywhere in the world, location is never a barrier, we have friendly learning tools to make your python programming training a worthwhile experience.

When you forgot to use sudo in linux bash

Geof — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 18:59:36 +0000

Save yourself some seconds

Once in a while we tend to make that mistake of forgetting to put sudo first when trying to run a command that requires root permission. When this happens we tend to start all over again by running the same command again.
Fortunately there's is a solution that saves you some seconds:
Just type sudo !!
Yes! That's it. The same command will be run again but with sudo this time.
Just be sure you have the root privileges.
Hit the follow button to see more hacks like this..

BUILD A TRANSLATOR WITH PYTHON IN 5 MINUTES.

Geof — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 20:42:06 +0000

BUILDING A LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR WITH PYTHON IS FUN.

Why pay a translator or purchase an expensive translation app when you can build an effective multilingual translator with python in 5 minutes?

Going furthermore, we’ll make this translator even more fun by adding a text to speech capability to it. This will also make it easy for one to use this translator to learn a new language. Sounds interesting right?

Talk is cheap..I know right? Well then let’s get down to the business of the day. To build this amazing translator with python, we’ll be needing a few python modules:

googletrans
gtts(Google text to speech)
playsound
pprint

To familiarize yourself with the aforementioned just click on them and view the module’s documentation.

LET THE CODING BEGIN..

First we’ll start by importing those modules:

from googletrans import Translator, constants
from pprint import pprint
from playsound import playsound
from gtts import gTTS

WHY DO WE NEED THESE MODULES?

So we’ll use google trans to translate to any language we choose.
Pretty printer(pprint) will print out language codes in a cleaner format.
Meanwhile we’ll use gtts to convert the translated language text to speech/audio format(mp3).Then we’ll use playsound to play the translated words(mp3).

Let’s put it all together in a function:

def trnslate():
    tr = Translator()
    pprint(f'The available languages and their codes are: 
 {constants.LANGUAGES}')
    lan = input('Please enter your desired language:\n')
    phrase = input('Say something nice:\n')
    translated = tr.translate(phrase, dest = lan)
    print(translated.text)

Let’s quickly explain the code:

We created a function called trnslate(), we didn’t call it translate to avoid issues since that’s a method in the module. Then we created an instance of Translator class and assigned to a variable tr. The we used the constants.LANGUAGES to print out all the available languages and their codes to our program user.

We set up the words to translate and preferred language in the variables named lan and phrase, you can call yours anything you like.

Then we translated and saved the phrase/words to the variable named translated and use pprint to print them out. Ordinarily if you don’t add the .text at the end of the variable translated you’ll get extra information about the translated words, but to limit things to only the translated texts we append the .text.

LET’S MAKE IT EVEN MORE FUN WITH TEXT TO SPEECH:

def trnslate():
    tr = Translator()
    pprint(f'The available languages and their codes are: {constants.LANGUAGES}')
    lan = input('Please enter your desired language:\n')
    phrase = input('Say something nice:\n')
    translated = tr.translate(phrase, dest = lan)
    print(translated.text)
    aud = gTTS(translated.text, lang = lan)
    aud.save('trantest.mp3')
    playsound('trantest.mp3')

trnslate()

So the extra codes added was to convert the translated words to speech. We used ggts to translate the text to the same language the user preferred.

But be advised: all the languages available in googletrans might not all be in gtts. So make sure the language you use is available in both modules. To confirm that, check the languages on googletrans with print(constants.LANGUAGES), then go to your command line and run gtts-cli –all. With the information you’ll be able to figure out all the languages the both modules have in common.

To avoid errors make sure all the modules are already installed and imported before running the codes. However if you wish to translate only without having the text to speech part, probably because the language you want is not on gtts, then you may comment or remove all the codes associated with gtts and your code will still work perfectly.

To see another tutorial on text to speech checkout this short tutorial here.

Hope you enjoyed building this quick translator with python codes. Remember you need internet for this codes to work effectively.

Click the follow button to automatically get the first hand information when the next post or more advanced translator with python tutorial is published.

MULTILINGUAL TEXT TO SPEECH IN PYTHON

Geof — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 23:58:53 +0000

CONVERTING TEXT TO SPEECH IN PYTHON IS EASIER THAN YOU THOUGHT..

Ever wondered how those pdf readers works? Or perhaps you have once wished if you could just be listening to a text while you do other stuffs instead of reading?

Well wonder no more because at the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to code up a text to speech program yourself in a matter of minutes.

Fun fact is that you can actually do more than just coding a test to speech program, you'll able to make it multilingual even with a topic of your choice. Sounds right fun right?

WHAT MODULES AND EXPERIENCE LEVEL DO YOU NEED TO CONVERT TEXT TO SPEECH IN PYTHON?

The difficulty rate for this program/codes is beginner/medium, and what’s required is not that much, once you already know the basics of python like importing of libraries/modules, python scope, indentation, input, while loop, functions and a few other similar concepts, then this should be fun..

However, we are going to be using the following modules for this program:
gtts
Wikipedia
Playsound
Time
Multiprocessing
OS

Meanwhile, If this happens to be your first time of using or hearing about the aforementioned modules, please do yourself some good by reading up the basics about them(You can just click on the aforementioned modules), however, you can still understand the code without reading them up, if you have the basic knowledge of python.

OK! we’ve had enough foreplay, let’s dive into coding without further ado..Talk is cheap but action is priceless

First off, we start by importing the necessary modules for this short project:

#let's import some necessary modules
from gtts import gTTS
import wikipedia as wk
from playsound import playsound
from time import sleep
import multiprocessing as mp
import os

So we have imported the necessary modules we need, to make the program even more fun we have to write 3 functions, the main function that will convert the text to speech, 2 nested functions to make the program fun and easy to use, like I said earlier we will do more than text to speech conversion.

The first nested function will be used to clear the screen when necessary. While the second nested function will print out whatever we insert as ‘content’ in a fun way as if you are using some text graphic design tool.

Inside the main function we will set up a variable (printfun) which we’ll use to spawn off a new process while some codes are executing the same time. Now let’s code everything up, I’ll explain the code afterwards.

#let's import some necessary modules
from gtts import gTTS
import wikipedia as wk
from playsound import playsound
from time import sleep
import multiprocessing as mp
import os


def get_info():

    #a function to clear the screen which works with all operating system
    def clear_sc():
        clear = ''
        if os.name == 'nt':
            clear = 'cls'
        else:
            clear = 'clear'

        return os.system(clear)

    #lets get the input from user, search, display and play the information.
    while True:

        try:

            word = input('\n Enter the phrase you want to search for:\n')
            sen = input('\n Enter the number of sentences you need in your information data. Digits only please!:\n')

            language = input('\nPlease choose your language option from the following lists:\n de: German, hi: Hindi, en: English, es: Spanish, fr: French, ar: Arabic. Please use the abbreviation only')
            clear_sc()
            wk.set_lang(language)
            print(f'\n[❗] Sourcing the information for {word} Please hold on...')
            info = wk.summary(word, int(sen))
            print('Done with information sourcing ✅')
            clear_sc()

            print(f'\n[❗] Generating the audio for {word} Please hold on...')
            audio_info = gTTS(info, lang = language)
            audio_info.save(f'{word}.mp3')
            print('Done with audio generation ✅')
            clear_sc()

        except:
            print('Please make sure you entered the right information in the right manner, be sure your phrase is wikipedia-comaptible, read the instructions again and try again')
            continue
        else:
            print('All good✅')
            break



    #lets create a function to print something a fun way
    def fun_print(content):
        for letter in content:
            print(letter, end = '', flush = True)
            sleep(0.07)

    #let's create a variable which will be used to spawn off a new process to use the fun_print func
    printfun = mp.Process(target = fun_print, args = (info,))

    #lets activate printfun
    print(f'\nBelow is summarized information about {word} in a written format:\n\n')
    printfun.start()

    #let's play the information as an mp3
    playsound(f'{word}.mp3')


get_info()

TEXT TO SPEECH IN PYTHON CODES EXPLAINED..

One of the beautiful stuffs about a good code is that any good programmer can follow up without a written explanation. However am still gonna make some basic explanations for total newbies.

First off, the first nested function(clear_sc) was used to clear the screen when necessary, this particular function will work on most operating systems including windows, linux and MAC. Read up the os module if you need to.

We used the while loop and try/except to control the possible errors from our code user and keep asking for the right input from the user until they get it right.

We added extra languages on the program to help our users whom English is not their first language. However you can even add extra languages to the code as well, all you need to see all the available languages, for instance in the case of gtts, just go to your command line after pip installing gtts and type in gtts-cli –all.

The variable printfun, which used the multiprocessing module, was used to spawn off a new process that targeted the second nested function(fun_print) function which prints out texts in a fun way. The reason for this that we want the fun_print to be printing the information out while our main code reads out the same thing being printed out using playsound module. Sounds like fun huh?

In case the code takes too long to fetch information, try stopping the code and change the language to en(English) I have noticed some languages takes too long. Meanwhile not all keywords/phrases works with wikipedia. Talking about wikipedia you might want to checkout this tutorial.

Furthermore, if you happen to get any error like ‘module error’, check if you have installed that particular module, you can install all the modules using pip install. However you don’t need to install os and time, you only need to import them.

So after generating the audio for information sourced with wikipedia, we saved and played the sound back using playsound module. To see more codes from Pythgenie on playsound module, check the following tutorials: Play music with python And How To Add And Play Sound In Python Codes.

Some people do use other modules like pyttsx3 for text to speech and pywhatkit for information sourcing, but I personally like to use gtts since the voice doesn't terribly sound robotic like pyttsx3.

I hope you enjoyed the short project though, feel free to exploit the codes, add more codes and even make it better than mine.

You can also extract information/contents from a pdf file using PyPDF2 or any other possible source and use what you learnt here to create your own pdf reader or something similar, sounds great right?

Let me know what you think on the comment section. Visit Pythgenie for more codes like this. Thank you for reading...

Extract Text From Image With Python

Geof — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 11:17:08 +0000

TO EXTRACT TEXT FROM IMAGE WITH PYTHON IS PRETTY EASY:

For some good reason one might want to extract texts from images, but the question is usually: how do I do that? , well.. if you happen to be among those that asked, Here comes the Calvary: Python is the answer.

We only need a few lines of code and just 2 python modules.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the codes already. We’ll begin by importing the relevant python modules for this program.

We are going to use Pytesseract and Pillow(PIL). In case this is your first time using the aforementioned modules, you might want to click on them for a quick documentation read-up.

To install both modules is easy too, just use the normal pip install [module]. In case you re using linux distro like ubuntu and you got a “module not found error” on pytesseract, try installing tesseract-ocr first with sudo apt install tesseract-ocr ,then go ahead and install pytesseract with pip afterwards.

Here is your code below:

#importing the necessary modules
import pytesseract as pt
from PIL import Image

#Converting image to text
img = Image.open('/[image path]/image.jpg')
extracted = pt.image_to_string(img)
print(extracted)
print(type(extracted))

That’s all! You just got any readable text on your image. Easy Pizzy huh? Here we used a .jpg image, but you can even use a png as well, depending what your image extension is.

Meanwhile, you can now do whatever you want with your extracted text. Now that I have proven to you that to extract text from image with python is super easy, feel free to also check this image manipulation tutorial here and see if it could come in handy in your next python project.

ENHANCE FILE MANIPULATION WITH PYTHON

Geof — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:53:18 +0000

Switch From Just Being Busy To Being Productive

Neither your boss nor your client is interested in your hard-work, no matter how much hours you put in if you are not being productive enough.

It’s amazing what we can do with python as programmers. And the fun fact is that these amazing stuffs can also make our daily job super easy and even boost productivity.

We'll learn in this short tutorial some interesting Python File Handling techniques with just few lines of code. Yes you heard right, you can do this amazing stuffs with just few lines of codes.

My Assumptions:

You already know the basics of python like lists, importing of libraries/modules/package, python scope, indentation, input, while loop, functions and a few other similar concepts.

The Take-away:

- How to open and use a file with python.
- How to use the os module to scan directories for a particular file and do something with the file(s).
- How to use the shutil module to move files from one directory to the other.
- How to use the send2trash module to safely delete file(s).
- How to use the glob module to get a specific extension(like .py, .text, .csv and etc) in directories.
- How to do bulk editing of large files and more.

Let's Get Down To Business:

First let’s start by learning how to open a file with python. It’s actually super easy, we can do that without importing any module. We can do that with the code below:

f = open('/path/file1.txt', 'w+')
f.write('This file will be deleted later')
f.close()

With code above we have edited the file “file1.txt” with information inside the parenthesis after the f.write, but bear in mind that with “w+” after the file path, we are actually telling python to create such file if it’s not in existence already. so in essence you can use w+ to read, edit and create new file.

There are other options you can use while handling files, like a+ (reading and appending extra content), r (reading), rb(reading in binary mode) and etc. To understand fully and see other options click here

Now enough of the foreplay, let’s have some real fun:

Let’s import some useful modules.

import os
import glob
import shutil
import send2trash

You may visit this [site] (http://python.org/) to learn more about the imported modules above, in this tutorial we are only going to use them for a quick and comprehensive python file handling functions and codes.

Now let’s create a function to scan our entire document directory.

import os
import glob
import shutil
import send2trash


#This function scans the directory entered, for a specific file extension and do something with them
def scan_ext():
    path = input('Enter path')
    gen = glob.iglob(path + "/**/*.py", recursive=True)
    for py in gen:
        f= open(py, 'a+')
        f.write('\n#moved')
        f.close()

#Now let's call the function
scan_ext()

The function above scans for any directory entered and search recursively for all the .py files (python files), open them and write inside those files ‘#moved’, we have to use a+ because w+ will overwrite the entire file while a+ appends ‘#moved” to the end of the content.

The glob module finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell, although results are returned in arbitrary order.

The glob among other things is used for such operations as you can see above, we could have also used glob.glob but glob.iglob returns a iterator which yields the same values as glob without storing them all simultaneously instead of memory in searching for the right files. You consider it in this function as a generator. To learn about glob checkout The documentation.

Remember that the path has to be in a string format, for instance in linux: ‘/home/you/Documents/projects/’

Now let’s do more python file handling fun stuffs. Let’s add the following code to the next line(just below the f.close()).

shutil.move(py, '/home/you/Documents/python_projects/'

The last code above will move each of the discovered python files to the folder “python_projects”. You are also expected to have created this folder already before moving files into it.

In case you prefer to delete those discovered python files instead, you can as well add the code below:

send2trash.send2trash(py)

However, to see all the python files discovered, just print them by adding the code below to the last line:

print(py)

Now let’s have some even more python file handling fun. We’ll remove the #moved string added on those python files with another function, because we don’t want to get confused when we see that comment on those files in the future. Remember we used # to make it a comment so as to avoid error while running those files in future.

import os
import glob

#let's remove the '#moved' string
def replace():
    path = input('Enter path\n')

    gen = glob.iglob(path + "/**/*.py", recursive=True)
    for py in gen:
        f = open(py, 'r')
        f_data = f.read()
        f_data = f_data.replace('#moved', '')

        ff = open(py, 'w')
        ff.write(f_data)
        ff.close()

    print('Check removal completed!')

replace()

Meanwhile recursive is actually set to False by default in glob, so we need to set it to True when we need it to be True.

Let’s explain the code further more: You’ll still have to enter the path where you moved those .py files to, open the files, read them, assign them to a variable(here we assigned it to f_data), then we replaced the ‘#moved’ string with empty space.

Then open the same py file again in w mode, then overwrite it with the new edited data(f_data) and close it. We also print that the removal has been completed.

The next python file handling function we’ll write will be with just the os module, and we’ll use the os.walk method to scan through the jupyter notebook files in a given path.

import os

def scan_dirs():
    #Get the file path
    f_path = input('Please enter your file path')
    print(f_path)

    #Make a loop that will scan all the folders, subfolders and files
    for folders, subfolders, files in os.walk(f_path):
        for f in files:
            if f.endswith('.ipynb'):

                print(f'{f}\n')



scan_dirs()

Let’s discuss about the function above briefly:

First we imported os as usual, we got the path with an input, then we used the os.walk method to scan through the files in the path entered, from folder to subfolder down to the files, by default it searches recursively once you get the loop codes right.

Then instead of using glob, we used the .endswith method to search for the right .ipynb files which is the normal jupyter notebook extension.

Then we print all the .ipynb files. Of course we call the function as well.

OK guys..I hope you had a nice python file handling fun with this tutorial. In my next python file handling tutorial we’ll write codes on opening, manipulating, converting and doing more with .csv, pdf and other important file types, using the modules used here and a few other ones like pandas, PYPDF2 and etc.

Meanwhile hitting the "Follow" button will help keeping you in the loop for upcoming tutorials.

To see more and other tutorials like this please visit Pythgenie.

BUILD A SIMPLE RESEARCH ASSISTANT WITH PYTHON

Geof — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 18:21:10 +0000

Among other great stuffs we can do with python, research and information sourcing can be done better and faster with python. In this tutorial we are going to build a simple research assistant with a few lines of code.

Meanwhile, we’ll be using a few python modules like Wikipedia and Pywhatkit to make this brief project fun and effective.

Firstly Let's Make Use Of Pywhatkit

Pywhatkit is a Python library with various helpful features. It is an easy to use library which does not require you to do some additional setup.

This module could also be used to send images and messages via whatsapp, play youtube videos, search the web, convert text to handwritten images and more. But for this brief tutorial we are basically going to use it to make a simple research assistant.

To get the full documentation on pywhatkit module click here

Pywhatkit doesn’t come preinstalled with python, but can install it with pip or pip3 by simply running: pip install pywhakit on your command line.

Then import the module whenever you want to use it.

#import pywhatkit
import pywhatkit as kit

#Get information about python in 5 lines/paragraphs
kit.info('python', 5)

The code above will give the following output:

Python is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its use of significant indentation. Its language constructs as well as its object-oriented approach aim to help programmers write clear, logical code for small and large-scale projects.Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly, procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library.Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s, as a successor to the ABC programming language, and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.

That sounds like fun right? However, the 5 is for number of lines you need, you change it to whatever number you need.
But there is a little limitation here: Normally you’d want to save the output to a variable or to a file and probably do something with it. However, before you do that, try and check the return type first. If you save the search result to a variable and print the type, it'll be NonetType

Something like this:

import pywhatkit as kit

sourced = kit.info('python', 5)
print('\n'*2)
print(type(sourced))

Fortunately there is another better way, in case you'd like to save your search results to a variable, file or even send it as an email then you should use Wikipedia instead

It’s actually similar to pywhatkit. You just install with pip: pip install wikipedia via command line, then you import the module.

Working With Wikipedia

Now let's code up something real fun:

#import wikipedia
import wikipedia as wk

# #create a function to ask for language, word and sentence lines. Use the inputs to generate basic information
# for the word entered
def find():

    while True:
        try:
            lang = input('Please choose a language: "fr" for france, "es" for spanish and "en" for english:\n')
            wk.set_lang(lang)

            word, sentence = input('Enter a word, space, followed by the number of lines you want(in figures):\n ').split()
            print(f'\nSearching wikipedia for {word}...\n')
            sourced = wk.summary(word, int(sentence))

            print(sourced)

        except:
            print('Please make sure you entered a wikipedia compatible valid information with the following format: Programming 5. Separating the inputs with a space only. Also make sure you selected a valid LANGUAGE!')

        else:
            print('\n......................................................\nResearch done!')
            break

#run the function
find()

Apparently both pywhatkit.info and wikipedia.summary are using the same knowledge base which is the official wikipedia, so you should not put any phrase or words that you wouldn’t normally search on wikipedia. It’s not google search engine. You may use .search instead of .summary to get search results from google(list format).

If haven't used the wikipedia library before, try and read the documentation here, it's actually precise and easy to understand, I strongly believe reading things up when necessary should be a major part of every programmer's skills.

OK guys.. This is just a simple research assistant program with python. Expect something more advanced on this same topic in the future.

If you'd like a more explained version of this post please visit the post page on my blog here.

Finally am kinda new here and this happens to be my first post on Dev, I'll be publishing more pythonic posts and your following up would be appreciated and would also make you see more of my posts.