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Thread: Some help needed please

  1. #1

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    Some help needed please

    I am by no means a programmer and would like to ask for some help if possible.

    I have a list of website addresses in an Excel column with an adjascent column of integers from 1 upwards.

    I would like someone to write a small bit of code to go to each website in turn and save the page as a pdf document with the names 1.pdf 2.pdf etc in a given folder on my C drive.

    Is this possible?

    Would be very grateful.

    All the best

    Stuart H

  2. #2
    Fanatic Member kpmc's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    When you guys are done writing his code for him, I still need you to get started on my backlog that nobody ever seems interested in writing... K, thanks...

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    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    Somebody may do this, so it doesn't hurt to ask. There are some things that make the task a bit more difficult, such as the Excel source, but it's hardly insurmountable. Still, this reads a whole lot like a joke from the 90s, back when "printing off pages" was the only way some people could consume the web. These days, with the highly variable nature of sites, doing something like this seems like it would be of only temporary value, at best.
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    Frenzied Member cory_jackson's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    I have availability at a reasonable rates. Friendly initial consultation is free.

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    Super Moderator jmcilhinney's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    I wonder why this is in VB.NET rather than Project Requests.

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    Re: Some help needed please

    Quote Originally Posted by jmcilhinney View Post
    I wonder why this is in VB.NET rather than Project Requests.
    I hadn't spotted the 'Project Requests' thread. I'll find it and put the request there. Cheers.

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    Re: Some help needed please

    Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker View Post
    Somebody may do this, so it doesn't hurt to ask. There are some things that make the task a bit more difficult, such as the Excel source, but it's hardly insurmountable. Still, this reads a whole lot like a joke from the 90s, back when "printing off pages" was the only way some people could consume the web. These days, with the highly variable nature of sites, doing something like this seems like it would be of only temporary value, at best.
    Hi Shaggy Hiker.

    The background for this is that my wife and I are fans of the cryptic crossword setter Rufus who does a weekly cryptic crossword for the UK newspaper the Guardian. He's done it every Monday for decades, but has just retired.
    The Guardian make them publically available on their website to download for free. There are over 750 of them and I have put together a list of the website addresses of all of the print pages for them (for example https://www.theguardian.com/crosswor...ic/21623/print), and wanted to turn them into either a file of single page pdf documents or from that a single pdf document of 750 pages, so that we could then spend 3 or 4 years going through and doing all of them. I have already bought the only published book of Rufus crosswords that I can find and done them all.

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    Re: Creating a file of pdf docs from a list of website addresses

    Sure it's possible.

    Quote Originally Posted by StuartHamilton View Post
    There are over 750 of them and I have put together a list of the website addresses of all of the print pages for them (for example https://www.theguardian.com/crosswor...ic/21623/print)
    If you visited all these pages already, why didn't you just print them out (or create a PDF) then?

  9. #9
    Super Moderator Shaggy Hiker's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    That's a good explanation. Without that explanation, I thought you might be doing something worthless, but I totally see what you are talking about. You probably don't care all that much about the Excel file, either. You just have a set of URLs. They happen to be in Excel, but Excel isn't what you care about.

    On the other hand, it makes for a pretty specific project. It will be used pretty much one time, and not for all that much. If somebody has the pieces built, they might toss it together for you. If somebody is looking for some practice in those areas, this seems like a nicely sized project. Heck, it might even tempt DDay into creating a coding contest out of it.

    By the way, you can also just ask that a thread be moved. I moved it anyways, then merged it in with the other thread...which had a better title, so I should have grabbed that, but oh well.
    Last edited by Shaggy Hiker; Mar 13th, 2018 at 09:59 AM.
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    Re: Creating a file of pdf docs from a list of website addresses

    Quote Originally Posted by topshot View Post
    Sure it's possible.



    If you visited all these pages already, why didn't you just print them out (or create a PDF) then?
    I haven't visited the individual pages.

    On the newspaper's website you can do a search of a particular crossword setter and there'll be a list of the reference numbers of the crosswords they have set.

    I noticed that the print page for each crossword had that crossword number as part of the address (i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/crosswor...ic/21623/print) and then used the concatinate function in Excel to combine it into an individual address. From there I dragged the cell down to create all 750 individual addresses, hence the list currently being in Excel.

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    Re: Some help needed please

    Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker View Post
    That's a good explanation. Without that explanation, I thought you might be doing something worthless, but I totally see what you are talking about. You probably don't care all that much about the Excel file, either. You just have a set of URLs. They happen to be in Excel, but Excel isn't what you care about.

    On the other hand, it makes for a pretty specific project. It will be used pretty much one time, and not for all that much. If somebody has the pieces built, they might toss it together for you. If somebody is looking for some practice in those areas, this seems like a nicely sized project. Heck, it might even tempt DDay into creating a coding contest out of it.

    By the way, you can also just ask that a thread be moved. I moved it anyways, then merged it in with the other thread...which had a better title, so I should have grabbed that, but oh well.
    Yes, spot on. They are currently in Excel as I used Excel to create the list of website addresses from the list of crossword reference numbers.

  12. #12
    Frenzied Member cory_jackson's Avatar
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    Re: Some help needed please

    Check out MS Office Interop for manipulating and accessing data in Excel. Quite handy. But if you don't need Excel, keep it in some data format that directly accessible in .NET. Text file, CSV, XML, or best, a SQL database.

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