Automation Scripts

This post keeps track of the automation scripts AI gave me while I was working. I hope they help you with similar problems. If you have other needs, feel free to get in touch.

WeChat: admilk47

#Automatically deleting files with extra prefixes

Scenario: a folder is full of stray files, all with a ._ prefix, for example:

After asking ChatGPT, I got a Python script that works really well:

In about a second, it wiped out all the clutter and left only the files I needed. So satisfying!

#Code

The code needs to run in a Python environment.

import os
import re

# Prepare a regular expression pattern to match filenames with a "._" prefix
pattern = re.compile(r'^\._')

# List all files and subfolders under the target folder
root_dir = './'
for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(root_dir):
    # Go through all files in the current directory
    for filename in filenames:
        # Build the path
        path = os.path.join(dirpath, filename)

        # If the filename starts with "._", delete the file
        if re.match(pattern, filename):
            os.remove(path)
            print(f"{path} deleted")

#Automatically extracting all URLs from a static site

If you've built a static site and aren't sure whether all of its URLs open correctly, you can use the code below to pull every URL out, then check them in bulk with a tool.

I now use claude.ai to write my scripts instead. It's a free AI service that's just as good as GPT-4.

#Code

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import os

# Find and read the sitemap.xml file
sitemap_path = os.path.join('build', 'sitemap.xml')
tree = ET.parse(sitemap_path)
root = tree.getroot()

# Extract all url elements
urls = []
for url in root.findall('{http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9}url'):
    urls.append(url.find('{http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9}loc').text)

# Write the URLs to a file
with open('redirect.md', 'w') as f:
    f.write('# Redirects\n')
    for url in urls:
        f.write(f'- [{url}]({url})\n')

print('Extracted URLs saved to redirect.md')

The extracted links all come out in the `` format. If you want to keep only the bare links, you can use the following code to strip them down:

import re

with open('your-file.md') as f:
  content = f.read()

# Use a regular expression to match the URLs inside []
pattern = r'\[(.*?)\]'
urls = re.findall(pattern, content)

# Write the URLs to a new file
with open('done.md', 'w') as f:
  for url in urls:
    f.write(url + '\n')

print('URLs extracted to old-urls.txt')