Tag

how-to

590 posts

Flat illustration of a spreadsheet grid with a selected cell and a formula bar.

Excel

Ten Signs Your Excel File Needs to Become a Database

Ten concrete signs that an Excel file has become a database, from several editors to lost updates and broken lookups, with a quick test for each.

7 min read

Excel

Testing That a Generated Excel Report Is Actually Correct

Test a generated Excel report with pytest: structure, control totals, formulas, formats and edge cases, plus a fixture of bad input and a golden file.

8 min read

YAML

YAML Anchors Aliases and Merge Keys Without Surprises

Define a block once with an anchor, reuse it with an alias, and merge it with the merge key. Real output shows overrides, sharing and where merging stops.

5 min read

YAML

YAML Lists and Mappings Without Confusion in Real Files

Block and flow styles for sequences and mappings, lists of mappings, empty collections and why a missing value is None, each with its parsed result.

6 min read

YAML

YAML Multiline Strings With Pipe and Greater Than Signs

The pipe keeps line breaks, the greater than sign folds them, and chomping indicators control the final newline. Six variants and the exact strings.

5 min read

YAML

YAML Strings Quoting and When You Really Need Quotes

Plain, single quoted and double quoted YAML strings compared, with the characters that force quotes and a table of values that silently change type.

5 min read

XML

Reading a SOAP Response and Pulling the Fields You Need

Pull records out of a SOAP response with lxml: mixed-namespace children, xsi:nil, empty versus absent, repeated nodes and exact decimals.

6 min read

XML

Running XSLT in Python With lxml and What It Reports

Compile a stylesheet once with lxml, pass parameters safely, read xsl:message from the error log, block file and network reads, and know the 1.0 limit.

7 min read

XML

Passing Parameters Into an XSLT Stylesheet Without Surprises

Pass values into XSLT from xsltproc and lxml, and see why a param that looks like a string is read as an XPath expression and silently ignored.

6 min read

XML

Sorting and Filtering XML With XSLT and the Text Sort Trap

Sort with xsl:sort and filter with XPath predicates in XSLT, and avoid the default text sort that put 250000 after 44.00 and 29.50. Multiple keys and case.

6 min read

XML

Grouping Records With XSLT 2 and Muenchian Keys Compared

Group 20,000 invoices by currency with a Muenchian key in XSLT 1.0 and with for-each-group in XSLT 2.0 on Saxon, with sums, counts and timings.

6 min read

JSON

Using JSON in Bash Scripts Safely With jq Arguments

Build and read JSON in Bash without breaking: jq --arg instead of string concatenation, newlines in values, exit codes, null as text and filter injection.

7 min read