How to get a table from google docs using a URL in python

As @augursol stated in their answer, this question comes from a developer aptitude test/job application, so can't be answered directly here. Instead, I'm going to provide instructions in English, which you can implement in code.

1. Create a curses screen for character grid display. Ideally, use curses.wrapper(callbackFunction) for error handling and clean-up.(You might want to create a window/panel with a statusbar line for debug output, but this isn't necessary.

2. From within the screen setup code, call a getTableData () function that gets the URL of the Google Doc from argv[1]. (Remember that argv[0] is the name of the script.)

3. Use the requests module/package to GET the Google Doc.

4. Use BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML, searching for the table element.

5. Loop through the rows, getting the cell contents as an array.

6. Return the data from the getTableData () function

7. Back in the curses code, process the row data in order to plot the characters within the grid. (You'll need to add code handling that checks if the X and Y coordinate data is numeric, using string.isnumeric ())

I solved this - since it's for a job application I'm not going to provide the full solution but I can point you in the right direction. I don't think you need to complicate things with Google Docs APIs - if you look at the response from the url, you'll notice that the data you want is in a table tag and that there is only one table element in the document. You can use an HTML parser to fetch this data pretty easily. Suggest you look at html.parser

For me steps were:

1. Create a parser that finds the table data you want and extracts the values from each row (start by just printing them to the console). You'll need to have a way to track when you hit a start tag for a table and also an end tag for a table. Also account for the fact that the first row has no data (column headers)

2. Create some data object that will be populated by the parser - I used a List of List objects. You'll want to call a method that updates this after reading a row of data from the table (every 3 values). You'll also need to handle padding - if you get a value that "skips" columns or lines, the skipped lines should be padded with empty lines and the skipped columns should be padded with spaces.

3. You'll need a method to print this data object. Note that the (0,0) value is in the bottom left of the image

This should be enough to get you started:

import requests
from html.parser import HTMLParser

class GoogleDocDecoderHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    inTable = False
    
    def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
        if tag == "table":
            self.inTable = True

    def handle_endtag(self, tag):
        if tag == "table":
            self.inTable = False

    def handle_data(self, data):
        if self.inTable:
            print(data)
        
            
class GoogleDocDecoder:
    URL = "https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQGUck9HIFCyezsrBSnmENk5ieJuYwpt7YHYEzeNJkIb9OSDdx-ov2nRNReKQyey-cwJOoEKUhLmN9z/pub"
    
    def decodeFromUrl(url):
        response = requests.get(url)
        html_content = response.content

        parser = GoogleDocDecoderHTMLParser()
        parser.feed(response.text)

    decodeFromUrl(URL)