avatar Bite 164. CLI tool: HTML link converter (stdin to stdout)

In this Bite you are going to help your team out automating a boring task.

They reached out to you with some data files that contain lines of (link_href, link_name). Unfortunately they also contain bad data.

The additional requirement is that your script can receive piped output from another process (read on ...)

Code up make_html_links that reads in data from stdin (use sys) and converts it to proper HTML:

  • Ignore the bad lines (no http in line, more than one comma, etc),
  • Strip white spaces around link_href and link_name,
  • Final twist: if the domain is NOT pybit.es or codechalleng.es make it an external link by adding target="_blank" to the resulting HTML.
  • Make the function print to standard output, don't return anything. The tests run your code as below and hence check standard output!

Running your program, which is automatically saved in a module called links.py, it should work like this:

$ cat data1
https://www.python.org, Python Homepage
bad data,blabla,123
https://pybit.es/generators.html , Generators are Awesome
more bad data

$ cat data1|python links.py
<a href="https://www.python.org" target="_blank">Python Homepage</a>
<a href="https://pybit.es/generators.html">Generators are Awesome</a>

$ cat data2
bogus data, again
https://codechalleng.es/bites/ , Bites of Py
https://stackoverflow.com/a/12927564,How to capture subprocess.call stdout
https://pybit.es/,Our labor of love
https://pybit.es/pages/about.html, About Us
https://nu.nl, Dutch news site

$ cat data2|python links.py
<a href="https://codechalleng.es/bites/">Bites of Py</a>
<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/12927564" target="_blank">How to capture subprocess.call stdout</a>
<a href="https://pybit.es/">Our labor of love</a>
<a href="https://pybit.es/pages/about.html">About Us</a>
<a href="https://nu.nl" target="_blank">Dutch news site</a>

Pretty cool/useful, no? Make your team happy and increase your coding ninja reputation in your org ;) - have fun and keep calm and code in Python!

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