#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 67-69: Copy and Paste with Pyperclip
Lecture: Demo: Affiliate script
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It's time to create something useful.
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This is a script we use, Bob and I use for PyBites,
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to actually put our affiliate code
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into some of the Amazon links that we use on the website.
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This is really cool because it's a great demonstration
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of how you can make a script for yourself
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that is useful day to day and is really
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just a nice, cool, dirty script.
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You know, it doesn't have to be pretty
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and it doesn't have to have
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all the cool Pythonic formation around it.
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It's not going to be any functions.
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It's not going to be anything, just a couple of lines of code.
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So let's start off by importing pyperclip,
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and what this code's going to do is it's going to take a URL
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and it's going to tack on our Amazon affiliate code
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onto the end of your URL.
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So it's going to paste it in, edit it,
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and then copy it back out to the clipboard.
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So the first thing we need is our affiliate code.
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That's a constant, it's not going to change.
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Let me just copy that.
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Now you'll notice that the affiliate code
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is this here, right?
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But this here, if you were to inspect
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any of the affiliate links that we have,
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you need to tack this onto the end of the URL,
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or somewhere in the URL, and this will then
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provide the correct affiliate link.
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You can't just put this in there.
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You have to have this there too, okay?
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Alright, so we'll move on.
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Now we want the URL, so the URL you're bringing in
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is going to be the pyperclip.paste, right?
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Now obviously, we're not going to do
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any huge amount of testing here,
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because this is just, again, a dirty script.
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I'm not going to sit here and say,
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well, if it's not a link that's being pasted in,
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you know, and all that sort of rubbish.
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We just want to go quick and dirty, okay?
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So the most we're going to do is check for the word Amazon
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in the URL, so if Amazon is not in our URL,
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well then, let's just return a message.
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What are we going to say?
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Sorry, invalid link, okay?
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Nice and simple, don't want to go over the top,
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and now what are we going to do?
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This is where we're going to manipulate the URL,
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so we've called in the URL with pyperclip.paste.
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We've checked to see if it has the word Amazon in it,
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and if it does have Amazon in it, we can then,
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let's create a new variable called new_link.
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And it's just going to be simple string manipulation.
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We're going to go URL, which is the paste,
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plus affiliate code.
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That's it, so pyperclip.copy
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as we saw in the other video,
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new_link, and then print.
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Alright, we're going to say
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affiliate link generated
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and copied to clipboard.
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Oops, close that off.
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Alright, so not much to it.
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It's actually very, very simple, isn't it?
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So we like that, so we're pasting it in.
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We're checking to see if it has Amazon in it.
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If it does, we're appending the affiliate code on,
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then we're copying it back to the clipboard, okay?
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Let's save that.
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Now if we need to run that, we just have to copy
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something to the clipboard, so let's copy my Gmail link,
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mail.google.com, and let's run the script, see what happens.
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Alright, it says sorry, invalid link.
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That's exactly what we wanted.
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And now I've just copied an Amazon link
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for one of those Fire Stick devices,
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and we're going to run the script again.
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And it'll go affiliate link generated
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and copied to clipboard, so let's just paste that in here.
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And there's all the standard Amazon URL,
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and then right on the end there we see
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end tag equals 0fpython20,
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which is our affiliate code.
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And then just to be sure, we can go check that
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in on Amazon and see if it works, and it does.
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I don't expect you to do that.
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This isn't some sort of cheap sales trick.
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Yeah, so it all works really well, and this is, again,
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a nice simple script.
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Obviously there's a lot of checking that could be done.
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For example, if I take amazon.com.au,
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copy that to clipboard, and then run this again,
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it's going to say it's generated, but when I hit paste,
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you can see we've just got amazon.com.au and the tag,
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which is not a valid link, so obviously this isn't something
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for production use for the rest of the world.
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This is just something that you're going to use
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just as a little hack job when you know you have
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the proper type of URL copied to the clipboard.
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So there you have it, nice little use case of.