Ancestors

Toot

Written by Russ Garrett on 2025-01-08 at 01:03

This python script is a memorial to the fact that this country's electricity system runs on horrific spreadsheets and they can't even publish them in a CONSISTENT FORMAT.

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Descendants

Written by Russ Garrett on 2025-01-08 at 01:05

I'm not sure where my life went wrong enough that I have an entire framework dedicated to parsing very particular Excel spreadsheets.

Another operator has an API! Very modern! But recently the JSON changed in such a way that completely gave away that it was just serving the contents of the same fucking spreadsheet.

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Written by doskel on 2025-01-08 at 01:08

@russss don't worry it's not just the UK, i've gotten CSVs from the US energy monitoring organization and the year column started as a string of a number, then to a float, then back to a string of a number. it's fucked everywhere

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Written by Russ Garrett on 2025-01-08 at 01:10

@doskel I had one where in one release of the spreadsheet it changed from MVA to kVA, except there was some formatting converting it back to MVA, but pandas obviously didn't know that, so everything was multiplied by 1000.

No problem, I have a multiplier option for exactly this reason.

Next release, it was back to MVA again.

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Written by Attie Grande on 2025-01-08 at 01:09

@russss This is very painfully true in the telecoms world too - I have specific (painful) experience of handling spreadsheets in various formats (csv, xls, xlsx, pdf) containing pricing information. Many of the suppliers clearly use the same software to produce the files, while also using different identifiers for countries / formats for dialling codes / etc...

😭

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Written by James Jefferies on 2025-01-08 at 08:27

@russss yes, we had lots of fun with that when I was working on Energy Sparks (and I think @ldodds is still having fun) with electricity data CSVs 🙃

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