Homework 4 : Make a Website
(D eadline as per Coursera)
This homework deals with the following topics:
● Reading and writing files
● Scraping and parsing information from a text file
● Very basic HTML
General Problem Specification
The basic skeleton of a website is an HTML page. This HTML page is a text file with a certain format. Taking advantage of this fact, one can take an HTML template and create multiple pages with different values stored. This is exactly what we are going to do in this HW.
Many websites use these kinds of scripts to mass generate HTML pages from databases. We will use a sample text file as our ‘database’.
Our goal will be to take a resume in a simplistic text file and convert it into an HTML file that can be displayed by a web browser.
What is HTML?
You do not need to know much HTML to do this assignment. You can do the assignment by just understanding that HTML is the language that your browser interprets to display the page. It is a tag-based language where each set of tags provides some basic information for how the browser renders the text that you write between them.
For example,
The Beatles
will be rendered by your browser as a heading with large font.
indicates the beginning of the heading and
indicates the ending of the heading. An HTML webpage is typically divided into a head section and a body section. We have provided you with a basic website template. We want you to retain the head section and write only the body section via your Python program.
For more details about HTML, your best resource will be to use the w3schools website which canbefoundhere:www.w3schools.com. Thiswebsitehasatonofinformationandprovides all of the common HTML you’ll need to know for this assignment.
Input Test File
We will read a simple text file that is supposed to represent a student’s resume. The resume has some key points but can be somewhat unstructured. In particular, the order of some of the
Introduction to Software Development
Introduction to Software Development
information will definitely be different for different people.
The following are the things that you definitely DO know about the resume:
● Every resume will have a name, which will be written at the top. The top line in the text file will contain just the name.
● There will be a line in the file, which contains an email address. It will be a single line with just the email address and nothing else.
● Every resume will have a list of projects. Projects are listed line by line below a heading called “Projects”. An example of what you might see in a resume file is something like this:
Projects
Worked on big data to turn it into bigger data Applied deep learning to learn how to boil water Styled web pages with blink tags.
Washed cars …
———-
● The list of projects ends with a single line that looks like ‘———-’. That is, it will have at least 10 minus signs. While this is a weird requirement, we are imposing it to actually make the assignment easier for you.
● Every resume will have a list of Courses. Courses are listed like: Courses – CIT590, AB120
OR
Courses :- Pottery, Making money by lying
● You are allowed to assume that every single resume will just have this comma separated list of courses with the word “Courses” being there in front of them. You do want to allow for s ome kind of punctuation mark(s) after the word “Courses”, and before the list of courses.
● So your program should be able to look at the above example and then extract the courses without including the ‘-’ sign or the ‘:-’ or any such punctuation that is in between the word “Courses” and the actual data we’re interested in.
The first step in this assignment is to create a sample resume that conforms to the format described above. We’re providing an example in the HW folder on Canvas, but please do not just blindly copy our resume. Write your own sample file in addition to the one provided. It does not have to be totally accurate but the HW is likely to be more fun if you make it close to reality.
Functions for Parsing the File
At the very least, you need to write one function for each piece of information that you want to extract from the text file. Contrary to previous homework assignments, in this assignment we will not tell you what to call the functions or what arguments to pass to them.
When we grade, we’ll look at how modular your code is and how you decided to break up the functionality into separate functions. We’ll also look at how you named the functions, what arguments they take, and how well you unit test the functions.
Here’s a basic breakdown of the functionality required to read the file into memory, parse each section of the file to extract the relevant information, and write the final HTML-formatted information to a new file.
Reading the File
● Since the resume file is pretty small, write a function that reads the file and stores it in the program’s memory.
● Then, you can use list and string manipulations to do all of the other necessary work. Detecting the Name
● This one is easy. Just extract the first line.
● The one extra thing we want you to do, just for practice, is to raise a R untimeError if the
first character in the name string is not an uppercase letter (capital ’A’ through ’Z’).
● So yes, in this case, your program will crash. You must provide a message saying that
the first line has to be a name with proper capitalization. We specifically want you to do
this by raising a RuntimeError.
● For example:
Brandon Krakowsky is a valid name
brandon Krakowsky is not a valid name
● Another thing to note is that the name on the first line could have leading or trailing
whitespace.
Detecting the Email
● Look for a line that has the ‘@’ character.
● Also make sure that the last four characters of the email are either ‘.com’ or ’.edu’.
● Make sure the email string begins with a lowercase English character between the ‘@’
and the ending (’.com’ or the ’.edu’)
● There should be no digits or numbers in the email address.
Introduction to Software Development
● The email string could have leading or trailing whitespace.
● These rules will accommodate lbrandon@wharton.upenn.edu but will not accommodate
lbrandon@python.org or lbrandon2@wharton.upenn.edu
● For example:
lbrandon@wharton.upenn.edu is a valid email lbrandon@wharton2.upenn.com is not a valid email lbrandon2@wharton.upenn.com is also not a valid email
● We are fully aware that these rules are inadequate. However, we want you to use these rules and only these rules.
● If an e-mail string is not found based on the given rules, consider the e-mail address to be missing. This means your function should return an empty string.
● PLEASE DO NOT GOOGLE FOR A FUNCTION FOR THIS. Googling for solutions to your homework is an act of academic dishonesty and in this particular case, you will get solutions involving crazy regular expressions, which is a topic we haven’t yet discussed in class. (In general, your code should never involve a topic that we have not discussed in class.). Plus, you can easily achieve the required functionality without the use of a regular expression.
Detecting the Courses
● Look for the word “Courses” in the file and then extract the line that contains that word.
● Then make sure you extract the correct courses. In particular, any random punctuation
after the word “Courses” and before the first actual course needs to be ignored.
● You are allowed to assume that every course begins with a letter of the English
alphabet.
● Note that the word “Courses”, the random punctuation, or individual courses in the list
could have leading or trailing whitespace.
Detecting the Projects
● Look for the word “Projects” in the file.
● Each subsequent line is a project, until you hit a line that looks like ‘———-’. This is
NOT an underscore. It is (at least) ten minus signs put together. You have reached the end of the projects section if and only if you see a line that has at least 10 minus signs, one after the other.
● If you detect a blank line between project descriptions, ignore that line.
● Also note that certain projects could have leading or trailing whitespace.
Writing the HTML
Once you have gathered all the pieces of information from the text file, we actually want you to
Introduction to Software Development
Introduction to Software Development
programmatically write HTML. Here are the steps for that:
● Start by saving the file r esume-template.html that is provided in the same directory as your code.
● Preview the file in a text editor that does HTML syntxsax highlighting (e.g. Sublime Text). Notice that there is an empty
● More specifically, your Python code will do the following:
o Open and read resume-template.html
o Read every line of HTML
o Remove the last 2 lines of HTML (you’ll programmatically add these back later) o Add all HTML-formatted resume content
o Add the last 2 lines of HTML back in
o Write the final HTML to a new file r esume.html
● Why are we doing this? Because the HTML in r esume-template.html looks something
like this, and we need to start by removing the last two lines of HTML (closing and