Simon Willison’s Weblog

Migrating out of PostHaven. Amjith Ramanujam decided to migrate his blog content from PostHaven to a Markdown static site. He used shot-scraper (shelled out to from a Python script) to scrape his existing content using a snippet of JavaScript, wrote the content to a SQLite database using sqlite-utils, then used markdownify (new to me, a neat Python package for converting HTML to Markdown via BeautifulSoup) to write the content to disk as Markdown. # 24th May 2023, 7:38 pm

Trogon (via) The latest project from the Textualize/Rich crew, Trogon provides a Python decorator—@tui—which, when applied to a Click CLI application, adds a new interactive TUI mode which introspects the available subcommands and their options and creates a full Text User Interface—with keyboard and mouse support—for assembling invocations of those various commands.

I just shipped sqlite-utils 3.32 with support for this—it uses an optional dependency, so you’ll need to run “sqlite-utils install trogon” and then “sqlite-utils tui” to try it out. # 21st May 2023, 9:39 pm

Cleaning data with sqlite-utils and Datasette (via) I wrote a new tutorial for the Datasette website, showing how to use sqlite-utils to import a CSV file, clean up the resulting schema, fix date formats and extract some of the columns into a separate table. It’s accompanied by a ten minute video originally recorded for the HYTRADBOI conference. # 31st July 2022, 7:57 pm

WarcDB (via) Florents Tselai built this tool for loading web crawl data stored in WARC (Web ARChive) format into a SQLite database for smaller-scale analysis with SQL, on top of my sqlite-utils Python library. # 19th June 2022, 6:08 pm

sqlite-utils: a nice way to import data into SQLite for analysis (via) Julia Evans on my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI tool. # 13th May 2022, 6:17 pm

sqlite-utils 3.26.1 (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.36.1 with one tiny but exciting feature: I fixed its one dependency that wasn’t published as a pure Python wheel, which means it can now be used with Pyodide—Python compiled to WebAssembly running in your browser! # 2nd May 2022, 6:43 pm

Where does all the effort go? Looking at Python core developer activity (via) Łukasz Langa used Datasette to explore 28,780 pull requests made to the CPython GitHub repository, using some custom Python scripts (and sqlite-utils) to load in the data. # 18th October 2021, 8:21 pm

Adding Sphinx autodoc to a project, and configuring Read The Docs to build it. My TIL notes from figuring out how to use sphinx-autodoc for the sqlite-utils reference documentation today. # 11th August 2021, 1:21 am

sqlite-utils API reference (via) I released sqlite-utils 3.15.1 today with just one change, but it’s a big one: I’ve added docstrings and type annotations to nearly every method in the library, and I’ve started using sphinx-autodoc to generate an API reference page in the documentation directly from those docstrings. I’ve deliberately avoided building this kind of documentation in the past because I so often see projects where the class reference is the ONLY documentation, which I find makes it really hard to figure out how to actually use it. sqlite-utils already has extensive narrative prose documentation so in this case I think it’s a useful enhancement—especially since the docstrings and type hints can help improve the usability of the library in IDEs and Jupyter notebooks. # 11th August 2021, 1:03 am

Everything new in Datasette since January, plus Django SQL Dashboard. I sent out the first Datasette newsletter since late January this year, covering everything that’s new in Datasette and sqlite-utils this year and introducing Django SQL Dashboard. # 10th August 2021, 1:28 am