Category: googlecloudplatform

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Creating A WordPress Blog Slug – NodeJS

A slug in WordPress is the part of the URL that references the blog title. For example, if the URL looks like example.com/2019/this-is-my-test-post, then this-is-my-test-post would be a slug. Typically a slug is all letters and numbers, with any other character being replaced by a dash.

The below code fragment is a simple JS function to reduce a blog title down to a slug – you may want to add some additional code to guarantee a certain slug length.


var generateSlug = function generateSlug(title) {
  var allowable_characters = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890";
  
  //Builds our own slug
  title = title.trim().toLowerCase();
  var title_array = title.split("");
  
  var outbound_title = " ";
  for ( var i = 0; i < title_array.length; i++) {
    var title_char = title_array[i];
    if ( allowable_characters.indexOf(title_char) != -1 ) {
      outbound_title = outbound_title + title_char;
    }
    else if ( outbound_title.split("").pop() != "-" ) {
      outbound_title = outbound_title + "-";
    }
  }
  
  console.log("Generated slug: " + outbound_title);
  
  return outbound_title.trim();
  
}//end generateSlug
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Querying For Previous Published WordPress Posts

The following code example pulls out the last 5 published WordPress posts by their ID, extracts the first ID (which is the last published post ID) and then extracts the post’s tags into an array.

$return_tag_array is a list of the last published post’s tags. 

  //Get list of past published posts, up to 5
  $args = array(
	'numberposts' => 5,
	'offset' => 0,
	'category' => 0,
	'orderby' => 'post_date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'include' => '',
	'exclude' => '',
	'meta_key' => '',
	'meta_value' =>'',
	'post_type' => 'post',
	'post_status' => 'publish',
	'suppress_filters' => true
);
	
  $published_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args, ARRAY_A );

  //Pull off the top most post, & retrieve the ID
  $last_published_post = reset($published_posts);
  $last_published_post_id = $last_published_post["ID"];

  //TAGS	
  //Use the post ID to pull off tags
  $tags = wp_get_post_tags($last_published_post_id);
  $return_tag_array = array();	
  foreach ($tags as $tag) {
	  $tag_name = $tag->name;
	  array_push($return_tag_array, $tag_name);
  }

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Adding Categories To A WordPress Post

I’ve been writing a custom WordPress plugin to accept emailed posts and insert them into a WordPress blog. One of the difficult issues I’ve encountered is that WordPress deals with tags and categories in different ways: it’s relatively easy to add and remove tags. It takes a bit of roundabout work to do the same with categories.

The below code fragment takes a string array of categories ( $to_post_categories ) and sets them onto a post (the ID of the post is in $created_post_id ).

	//Set post categories
	/**
	 * WP doesn't allow us to set categories as easily as tags. With tags we can simply declare 
	 * the names of the tags and be done with it. WP requires that we pass in the ID of the category, 
	 * and if the category doesn't exist, we need to create it. So we loop through the array of 
	 * category names, see if they exist (and if so, collect the ID) and if they don't exist, 
	 * create the category and map the ID to the post.
	 **/
	 foreach ($to_post_categories as $category_name) {
		 $category_id = get_category_by_slug($category_name);
		 if ($category_id == false) {
			 //Category doesn't exist, create it
			 $category_id = wp_create_category($category_name);
		 }
		 
		 //category_id now holds ID of right category or recently created category.
		 //Add category to post
		 wp_set_post_categories($created_post_id, array($category_id), true);
	 }//end looping through post categories sent to us

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Listing Files Within A Bucket Folder – Python

Here’s a short code example in Python to iterate through a folder’s ( thisisafolder ) contents within Google Cloud Storage (GCS). Each filename can be accessed through blobi.name – in the below code sample, we print it out and test whether it ends with .json.

Remember that folders don’t actually exist on GCS, but a folder-like structure can be created by prefixing filenames with the folder name and the forward slash character ( / ).

    client = storage.Client()
    bucket = client.get_bucket("example-bucket-name")
    blob_iterator = bucket.list_blobs(prefix="thisisafolder",client=client)
    #iterate through and print out blob filenames
    for blobi in blob_iterator:
        print(blobi.name)
        if blobi.name.endswith(".json"):
            #do something with blob that ends with ".json"
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Python SQLite Table Creation Template

I often use the Python sqlite3 module: it helps save time during development as it’s a lightweight SQL engine. Even in production, some small applications can get away with running SQLite instead of a more normal SQL application.

To create a table in sqlite:

import sqlite3
def create_table():
    create_table_sql = """CREATE TABLE tweets (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL UNIQUE,
     posted_date DATETIME, tweet_text VARCHAR(300),
     user VARCHAR(20), retweet_count int, favorite_count int,
     original_tweet_id VARCHAR(20)
     original_user VARCHAR(20));"""
    conn = sqlite3.connect("example.db")
    c = conn.cursor()
    c.execute(create_table_sql)
    conn.commit()
    conn.close()

And to execute operations against the created table, you simply need to connect to example.db and run c.execute:

# Execute into sqlite
conn = sqlite3.connect("example.db")
c = conn.cursor()