How to transform daily emailed data into a web–accessible chart?
April 15, 2013 9:47 AM   Subscribe

I get reports emails every morning with simple, TSV data in the message body - and am trying to do something pretty with them, automatically.

I'd like to forward these emails ... somewhere... and have them transformed into charts that are viewable on a password-protected site, or something like Panic's Status Board app.

Are there any tools that can help me get this job done? The simpler, and cheaper, the better. I looked at sites like StaHat.com but still felt like I was missing a few steps.

I don't have access to BusinessObjects or CrystalReports. but I do have FTP access to a server and some coding skills in HTML, C and python. Also pretty good with excel, if that helps.
posted by borborygmi to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: assuming you can access your email via pop3 or imap, python has libraries for you to download and process your email

http://docs.python.org/2/library/poplib.html

http://docs.python.org/2/library/imaplib.html

you'll have to do some googling (e.g. python poplib attachments) to find examples of how to get at the attachment. that part isn't totally straightforward, but definitely doable.
posted by maulik at 10:30 AM on April 15, 2013


Google has a chart API if that's at all useful for the charts part.
posted by wintrymix at 5:05 PM on April 15, 2013


If you can use the Python to save the TSV files as CSV on a webserver, then you might look at Status Board for iPad. It's really simple to have up-to-date charts and tables using it.
posted by flif at 6:04 AM on April 16, 2013


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