This practice was certainly more challenging than the prvious text conversion practice. This was because the two scripts that we wrote to execute the commands had a more sophisticated struture and also they contained some new elements such as defining a unique identifier and time stamp. The second script was even more complicated and although now I understand the logic of what is in there, I could not have written it without looking at John’s script and his explanations!

The first script:

  • First I created a list of five questions.
    I wrote the first script that when you run it will do the following:
    • Ask each question of the user running the script.
    • Write a random string of characters to a variable as a unique identifier.
    • Write the datestamp to a variable.
    • Accept text input from the user and write each answer as a variable.
    • Save all answers and other data to a CSV file.

*To gather some data I answered the questions twice (John also kindly answered the questions)in order to create a database that has the appropriate variables and variable types.
The second script to automate transfering data to SQL: I wrote the second script (With major help from John) to write my data into a MySQL database.
I had to Run this script after collecting data in the data backup.csv file.
To begin the script I Set MySQL credentials and then copy everything in backup into temp in the SQL. I Get to my SQLWrite data from tmp.csv into database table. Then dump current version of database into export file and lastly removed the temporary file.

This was challenging but fun and satisfying when you see it run!