Non-ASCII characters can pose challenges in data cleansing for several reasons: Therefore, it’s a good practice to standardize or normalize text data to ASCII when possible, or ensure correct handling of non-ASCII characters. This helps to maintain data integrity and simplifies subsequent data processing tasks. Superscripts, subscripts, or “special” characters often look like ascii characters […]
Tag: python
Comparing and merging lists in Excel, Python
Identifying anomalies, duplicates, and updating data necessitates comparing information from various sources. Accurate execution of these tasks is crucial, whether working solely with spreadsheets or using a mix of tools and languages like databases and web services. In this post, I will demonstrate various methods for comparing lists of identical or differing sizes across different […]
How to export a Youtube playlist for free
In this post, I’ll explain the steps to export your playlist on Youtube or one that’s shared with you for free. No, not the actual content like music tracks or videos, as for that, you’ll need a premium account, but the list of names such as artist or author names, tracks or video titles, and […]
Music Playback from a CSV (Python)
In my earlier blog post An Interactive Musical Keyboard Player (Python), I shared the full code on how to write an interactive musical keyboard that can also save what you play into memory and optionally to a file. In this post, I’ll share a related component as a separate code module that can read a […]
Reshaping data for Excel via Python
In this post, I demonstrate an effective way to reshape a CSV or XLSX file that originally has multiple rows repeating for each column. For example, many raw data exports will include a country’s metrics (GDP for example) for the year in each row and it repeats for different years as rows. Cntry Year GDP […]
An interactive musical keyboard player (Python)
In this post, I am sharing my Python code for creating a simple musical keyboard player that can be played using a standard computer keyboard. The app will generate specific musical notes as you press keys A-Z on your keyboard. You can increase a note by half-step or full-step by each press. So, increasing by […]
Find Superscripts, Subscripts, and Unicode in a text file (Python)
Occasionally, it becomes necessary to search for special characters like superscripts, subscripts, symbols, emojis, or any Unicode characters within a text document. This is crucial when working with data files that should not contain any such characters, unless they are explicitly required and managed. Most editors, including Word, lack a ‘Find’ feature that reveals all […]
Windows 11 Boot MicroAnimation and Wise Monkey using just text
Recently, an ex-colleague of mine brought to our attention the Microsoft font possibly used in creating the spinning dots in Windows 11 boot screen. The font is called “Segoe Boot Semilight” and is a true type font. So, I had to verify that this is true, and I wanted to try to create the animation […]
Different ways to generate a list and array containing numbers
In this post, I show different ways to generate a list and array containing numbers (ints, and floats, positive and negative, mixed) in python…using random, list, and numpy arrays. Why do we need both? NumPy arrays are very efficient for numerical operations and require elements to be of the same data type, whereas lists are […]
Finding min, max in a sequence and plotting the distances
Let’s say that we have a sequence of numbers in consisting of whole numbers, fractions, positive and negative numbers of varying length, that is, of no predefined length (e.g.2.25, 5.25, 6.75, 8.25, 9.75…). What we want to do is to sort the numbers in ascending order, and find the differences between 2 adjacent numbers and […]