How to Extract Metadata from Python Files with GNU Translations
1. To kick things off metadata! It’s basically information about your file that doesn’t actually contain any content, like the author or date created. But why would we want to extract this metadata? Well, for starters, it can be really helpful when dealing with large datasets or trying to organize files in a specific way.
2. So how do we get our hands on this metadata? That’s where GNU Translations comes in! This handy tool can extract all sorts of information from Python files (and other types too), including author, date created, and more. And the best part is, it’s open source and free to use!
3. If you’re like me (and by that I mean a lazy programmer), you might be wondering why we can’t just write our own metadata parsing tool from scratch. Well, because who has time for that?
4. But seriously, there are plenty of reasons to use GNU Translations instead of rolling your own solution. For one thing, it’s already been tested and debugged by a community of developers, so you don’t have to worry about any ***** bugs or compatibility issues. And for another thing, it supports Python files out of the box no need to write custom parsing logic!
5. So how do we use this magical tool? Well, first things first: install it on your system (if you haven’t already). You can do that with pip or your favorite package manager. Once it’s installed, open up a terminal and navigate to the directory where your Python files are stored.
6. Now let’s say we have some Python scripts in this folder called “my_scripts”. To extract metadata from all of them at once, you can run:
# This script uses exiftool to extract metadata from all Python scripts in the "my_scripts" folder.
# It will output the author and creation date for each file.
# To use this script, make sure exiftool is installed and navigate to the directory where your Python files are stored.
# The following command uses exiftool with the following options:
# -a: Extract all available metadata
# -m: Ignore minor errors and warnings
# -r: Recursively process subdirectories
# -q: Quiet mode, suppress progress messages
# -Author: Extract the author metadata
# -CreateDate: Extract the creation date metadata
# my_scripts/*.py: Specifies the files to be processed, in this case all .py files in the "my_scripts" folder.
exiftool -a -m -r -q -Author -CreateDate my_scripts/*.py
7. This command will extract the author and creation date fields from all Python scripts in “my_scripts”. The “-a” option tells exiftool to display all available tags, “-m” makes it quieter, “-r” recursively processes subdirectories, and “-q” makes it faster by skipping any files that don’t have the specified extension (in this case “.py”).
8. You can customize your metadata parsing to suit your needs just adjust the options as needed. But if you ever find yourself struggling, remember: we lazy programmers need all the help we can get.