I can know it!
Fixing Google Contacts CSV Export
It’s the annual “painstakingly write out a ton of Christmas cards and mail them” time of the year again, however this year I’ve set out (and succeeded) to make Erin’s life a little easier.
You see, I found this fantastic article that described how one could simply export a Google contacts list to CSV and use the Avery Designer Pro (I’m using the mac version) to map the columns from the export to generate the labels. This sounded incredibly easy, and so I set out to try to simplify our Christmas card mailing process…
After blindly following the guide (see above), I quickly realized there was a huge issue – Google does not do anything to ensure the resulting CSV file is formatted properly. While there are many, many columns in the CSV export (including individual fields for the various components of an address), Google has taken the easy way out and simply filled in the “formatted” address column along with all of the line breaks occurring from typing the address in. The end result was the Avery software printing out 2 (or more) separate labels for every contact, with their address being split across them. So, I decided to fix the CSV file.
I ended up writing this script in Python, solely because of the built-in CSV library. I know the new version of Ruby (1.9+) merged the fastercsv gem in, however I just didn’t want to mess with it. Essentially, the script does two things:
- Fixes the “formatted” address column to remove any line breaks
- Breaks the address up and puts the parts in to their respective columns
After loading the “fixed” google export file in to the Avery designer, I was able to add the name, address, po box, city, state and zipcode fields to the labels and everything worked like a charm.
At some point, I may get around to turning this in to a a service so one could simply upload the original version and download the fixed, however I just don’t really have an abundance of time and I wouldn’t want anyone freaking out about privacy concerns – so feel free to just download the script and use it.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 | #!/usr/bin/env python ''' Copyright (c) 2010 Doug McCall [dhm116@dougmccall.com] Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ''' from Tkinter import * import csv, tkFileDialog master = Tk() master.withdraw() # Get the CSV file filename = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename(filetypes=[('CSV Files', '.csv')]) people = open(filename, "rb") rows = people.readlines() # We've got the rows, so close the actual file people.close() # Remove the header row so it's not processed header = rows.pop(0); # Start a list of corrected addresses fixed = [] # Iterate through the rows of data for row in rows: # Store this row in something else in case we can't directly manipulate the row data data = row # This should probably be corrected, but for now just arbitrarily pick some length # for the contact line to be longer than if len(row) > 50: #print "Adding new address line" # If we already have some corrected addresses, append a new line # * This probably isn't necessary any more now that I'm feeding the # fixed data as a list to the CSV reader if len(fixed) > 0: index = len(fixed) - 1 fixed[index] = ''.join((fixed[index], '\r\n')) # Add the data to the list of corrected data with any carriage returns removed fixed.append(data.rstrip()) #print "\t" + fixed[len(fixed) - 1] else: # We've found a fragmented address line #print "\tAdding split address line" # Strip off the carriage return at the end data = data.rstrip() #print "\t\t" + data # Join this fragmented address line to the previous line of data index = len(fixed) - 1 fixed[index] = ', '.join((fixed[index], data)) #print "\tFixed version" #print "\t\t" + fixed[index] #if data.count(',,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,') == 0: # print 'Looking for the next full address' # row_start = True # Put the header row back in the corrected data fixed.insert(0,header) # Load the corrected data in to the CSV reader to more easily manipulate the columns spamReader = csv.reader(fixed, delimiter=',') # Ask the user where to save the resulting data filename = tkFileDialog.asksaveasfilename(filetypes=[('CSV Files', '.csv')]) f2 = open(filename, 'w') writer = csv.writer(f2, delimiter=',') rownum = 0 for row in spamReader: if rownum > 0: # Print out the fully corrected address for debugging print str(rownum) + ": " + row[36] # Isolate the address parts addr = row[36].split(',') # Obtain the State and Zip code from the last part of the address state_zip = addr.pop().split() # If we're not using state abbreviations and there is a space in the state # name, we need to merge those back together if len(state_zip) > 2: state_zip[0] = state_zip[0] + " " + state_zip[1] # Get rid of the unneeded parts from the merge state_zip.pop(1) # Combine the state and zip back in with the address addr.extend(state_zip) #print addr # Set the address column data row[37] = addr[0] # Set the city row[38] = addr[-3].lstrip() # If there is a secondary address (apt. num, etc.) if len(addr) > 4: row[39] = addr[1] # Set the state row[40] = addr[-2] # Set the zip code row[41] = addr[-1] #print row writer.writerow(row) rownum += 1 f2.close() |
This requires python 2.6 or 2.7 (might work on older version, but I haven’t tested).
Just run the script using ‘python fix-addresses.py‘ and it will prompt you for the original csv file and where you would like to save the results.
I’d love to hear back if anyone makes improvements!
| Print article | This entry was posted by Doug McCall on December 21, 2010 at 11:12 AM, and is filed under Programming. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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