Geek or Nerd?

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21

say for example I realise that it’s shawarma not pies, and want to make an easy fix without troubling the python code

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22

Would it be too messy to store the response in separate text files & read them in with Python?

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23

And don’t forget this bit!

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24

hmm that’s a lot of files. maybe though - it’s a thought because then could just reference them by name

25

Or maybe one file with some kind of headers for each response.

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26

Are you making a front end and want the formatted text to be displayed with bullet points?

Or is it just a pop-up in Excel at the minute?

A few screenshots might help :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Maybe Python is over engineering this?
Sounds to me like you could easily knock this up in an Access “database” with some VBA :person_shrugging:t3:

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27

I tried VBA, it’s horrible :face_vomiting: all that object oriented stuff :face_vomiting:

will try some screenshots later

the python is great for scraping data from about 5 different lab pdfs, and a dump from our own system which for unknown reasons can only be a pdf. I’m keeping the scraped data in a python dictionary.

then there’s an excel template spreadsheet with all the possible fields I could want to report on. python fills them from the dictionary. some will be left blank, that’s ok.

so at this point I have a nice looking spreadsheet, automatically populated. happy with thing up to this point, to my amazement it works.

what I want to do next is build a .doc with pre-written text paragraphs based on the different values in the spreadsheet cells- just not sure of the best way to do this.

it’s not a straight if A then B, it’s more if A but not B and C is less than D, then text xxx , etc

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28

Guessing you’re not using classes, instances and attributes in Python then? :joy:

So this spreadsheet, I’m guessing, has patient data in it; from which you wish to create a letter to them, as a .DOC file.

I’d store them as text files and have Python read them in as dictionaries. Have your BMI phrases stored as “BMI_letter.txt” and then Python can use those letter up to the underscore to save the dictionary dynamically :white_check_mark:

I’d save all of the text files in a sub-directory of the Python application in let’s say a folder called “parameters”
For BMI, I might have something like;

(Float(‘-inf’, 0) : “Something went wrong”
(0, 184) : “Eat more shawarma”
(185, 249) : “Keep doing what you do!”
(250, 299) : “Slow down at those hotel nights”
(300, 399) : “Eat less shawarma”
(400, float(‘inf’)) : “I didn’t realise elephants were here!”

Then just have some logic to read that in to a “master” dictionary of dictionaries :orange_book::books:

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29

Yep exactly that

Thanks for those tips, that sounds great, I’ll try it :+1:

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30

Nice pun

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31

Does the Excel “look like” the letter?
Or is it just data?

If the latter, get that read into a Pandas dataframe, then iterate over that to produce a letter per observation :white_check_mark:

You could use aspose-words to do that.

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32

just being trying to get my head round all this " init self " stuff. Not there yet. Is it just good discipline, or does it actually make better code?

33

dunders = double underscores

I’m guessing you’ve just got a massive piece of code that’s not broken up into functions in sub directories.

Do you use

if _ name _ = _ main _ then:

At all?

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34

erm…

35

so no, but I have broken up the main bit of code by writing other .py files for some parts and importing them into the main bit

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36

How’ve you done that?

With an “import myCoolFunction from Utils as mcf”

Or something like that?

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37

yep, like that: in the main program, at the start:

import read_lab_report.py

and then later on:

data.extend(read_lab_report.scan_pdf(filename))

where data is the dictionary containing all the stuff for the report, filename is the path to the pdf with the actual results, scan_pdf is a function in read_lab_report.py

dunno if that’s a good way to do it but seems it’s breaking the thing up into manageable modules

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38

You could go to town on it :joy::face_with_peeking_eye:

Do you know about eggs and wheels?
And a requirements file for the virtual environment?

But … sounds good what you’ve done :white_check_mark:

Have you built coverage tests and got a report spat out once it’s built? :face_with_peeking_eye::joy:

Get some of those functions decorated and parameterized.

I’d also expect all of your functions to have lovely docstrings, so we can document the application using Sphinx :wink::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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39

Can hear these words coming out, but am not sure what they mean :smile:

obv I’m just a hobby jogger

did read an interesting thing about objects though on the back of what you said: that if you set a=40 it creates an object “40” , and then if you set b=a it doesn’t create another object, just makes a note that the object “40” has been referenced twice. Then if you do stuff like a+=1 and b = something else, it makes a note that the object “40” is no longer referenced anywhere and destroys it… is that right?

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40

Maybe neither does Poet, but they impress at the interview, and a contractor is gone before they find out…

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