Guest Post: A Response to Directory to Webpage

3 November 2007

In the last post, I talked about how I turned a directory of PDFs to an HTML-list. An example of the filenames was C_L_Warrior.pdf, which I turned into a simple index of files by author.

dbr, a warrior who frequently comments here, has written in with some improvements. Over to him:

Hello. I'm not 100% sure what the section:

i.split('.')[0].replace('_', ' '):

is supposed to do, but I assume it's supposed to split the extension off the file, and replace all underscores with spaces - Assuming I'm right, it doesn't work with multi-extension files, like "QS.3814.dmg.part" (a file I happened to have in the same folder as I quickly ran the code..)

'.'.join(i.split('.')[:-1]).replace('_',' ')

seems a little convoluted, but basically it splits the filename, and rejoins them excluding the final extension.

And since shoving everything in one line is fun, the first version of the code as a list-comprehension (which also happens to be faster):

print '\n'.join(['<li><a href ="%s">%s</a></li>' %
(i, '.'.join(i.split('.')[:-1]).replace('_',' '))

for i in os.listdir('./')])

Let's measure the speed of the code, the first is the original code, the second is as a list-comprehension.

[dbr@schism:~/Desktop]$ time python listdir.py
[...]
real 0m0.222s
[dbr@schism:~/Desktop]$ time python listdir_listcomp.py
[...]
real 0m0.079s

And since I'm extremely bored, as a bash-script:

for cfile in `ls`; do echo "<li><a href=""$cfile"">
$(echo $cfile|sed -e 's/\.[^.]*$//')</a></li>"; done

1 Felix says...

The Bash script can be a little shorter:

for cfile in *;
  do
  echo "<li><a href=\"$cfile\">${cfile%%.*}</a></li>";
done

Posted at 3:28 a.m. on November 4, 2007

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