Quick Script: Tape Inventory

Skills with programming can be useful in all kinds of daily life situations! I just encountered one where I was making an inventory of some cassette tapes I'm getting rid of.

I jotted down the list of tapes in a quick, rough format of "artist - album", unless it was a compilation or collection, in which case I just wrote the name on the tape.

I want to give this list to my relatives who will undoubtably be using spreadsheet software, so I want to munge this rough list into a nicely formatted spreadsheet for them. Let's write a quick script!!

Input

Here's a sample of my notes file:

frank sinatra - academy award winners
the pachelbel canon and other baroque favorites
prince and the revolution - around the world in a day
talking heads - little creatures
crosby, stills, & nash - self-titled

I want to make sure that the following things are fixed: - Artists and albums are separated by commas so it's treated as a CSV - Self-titled albums should be replaced by the name of the band - The First Letter Of Every Word Should Be Capitalized - Compilations or collections should have their artist set to "Collection"

Let's get to work!

Writing Something

I'm going to be using python, since it's my favorite language and it's easy to talk about. Modules I'll be using: - fileinput takes standard input and iterates over every line (I'll be putting the input file in through stdin) - string.capwords capitalizes the first letter of every word in a provided string

I start this script out the way you usually start scripts that use fileinput:

import fileinput
from string import capwords

for line in fileinput.input():
    # do stuff

Now that we have access to each line of the file in a variable called line, let's work with lines that contain an "artist - album":

for line in fileinput.input():
    if '-' in line:
        # contains artist - album
        sp = line.split('-')
        artist = sp[0]
        album = '-'.join(sp[1:]).strip()
        if album == 'Self Titled':
            album = artist

As you can see, this handles splitting apart the album and artist portions of the line, and then sets the album name appropriately for self-titled albums. Next, we need to handle the case of a line that doesn't contain "-", a collection:

    else:
        # some kind of collection, collaboration, etc
        album = line
        artist = 'Collection'

Easy, the whole line is the name of the album. Now to output each line:

    print '{0},{1}'.format(capwords(artist), capwords(album))

This capitalizes the album and artist after we've decided what they're going to be. That's the end of this little script! I invoked it like:

cat tapes.txt | python parsetapes.py | tee tapes.csv

and there we go! A spreadsheet full of usefully parsed tape information.

Thanks for reading!

The Script

import fileinput
from string import capwords

for line in fileinput.input():
    if '-' in line:
        # contains artist - album
        sp = line.split('-')
        artist = sp[0]
        album = '-'.join(sp[1:]).strip()
        if album == 'Self Titled':
            album = artist
    else:
        # some kind of collection, collaboration, etc
        album = line
        artist = 'Collection'
    print '{0},{1}'.format(capwords(artist), capwords(album))