I sure am going to be unpopular, but I don’t get why an App is allowed to make “silent” network requests – in other words: I don’t get why the Network Indicator isn’t shown by the OS to alert users that there is network activity going on. However if you have a function, which makes […]
I needed to convert a Unix Timestamp, which for some inexplicit reason was being returned as a String by an API I was using and this is the super foolish function I ended up with. I am not going to shame the API Provider for returning a timestamp as a String 😉 func createDateTime(timestamp: String) […]
For an app that I was writing I needed an easy function to scale an image to a specific width, the function below will accomplish this: func scaleImageWidth(sourceImage:UIImage, scaledToWidth: CGFloat) -> UIImage { let oldWidth = sourceImage.size.width let scaleFactor = scaledToWidth / oldWidth let newHeight = sourceImage.size.height * scaleFactor let newWidth = oldWidth * scaleFactor […]
I have a few days off and was having a play with creating a very simple app. The app basically allows you to take a photo, add a description and saves all of it to Core Data. Unfortunately Core Data cannot save images the way they are, so you first need to convert them to […]
I was working on an API response, which provided data in a custom XML markup within the string, which was returned. I wanted to simply extract the “linkTerm”. The snippet I got looked like this: <link linkTarget=”URL” linkTerm=”https://some.provider.com/lib/something/detail.action?docID=5176530″ linkWindow=”_blank”>Online-Zugang</link> Now surely there will be more elegant ways of doing it, but I felt that I […]
Yesterday I was working on a small PHP script in which an API sends “xml” within the response. That XML is supposed to make handling the data easier, but to be fair I just didn’t need it. This is the snippet that the API returned <searchLink fieldCode=”AR” term=”%22Krugman%2C+Paul+R%2E%22″>Krugman, Paul R.</searchLink> At first I tried to […]
This will sound very boring to anyone not involved with Library data, but pymarc totally blew my mind the other day. The library – available from https://pypi.org/project/pymarc/ or via pip install pymarc allows super simple processing of MARC data. My personal need was to quickly and efficiently convert records from MARCXML to MARC21. To do that you obviously […]
If you ever need to list only directories that are within a directory, you can use ls -d */ – very simple and very efficient… just like we like it 😉
Writing a web scraper with python is easy, if you allow yourself a little help by two beautiful libraries BeautifulSoup Requests import sys, requests from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup # we want UTF8 reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding(‘utf8’) #lets define the URLs we will use to scrape url = ‘https://www.somepageortheother.nl/bladeren’ # let’s scrape the first URL and get all […]
Do you need to install pip on macOS? Easy, simply do the following sudo easy_install pip