{"id":34597,"date":"2025-08-18T15:38:24","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=34597"},"modified":"2025-08-18T15:38:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:38:24","slug":"a-little-ingenuity-and-a-bit-of-code-make-the-world-go-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=34597","title":{"rendered":"A Little Ingenuity and a Bit of Code Make the World Go Round"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own cleverness and creativity. Case in point…<\/p>\n

At Diamond, we maintain two completely different SKU systems to refer to inventory. There’s a stock code system (prefixed STK or STL), and there’s an item code system (prefixed in a MMMYY system, such as SEP25). Occasionally over the years I’ve been asked why this is, and I have no answer. It was a data design decision made long before I started working for Diamond, and as with many things in the world, it worked and continued on its own inertia. I recall conversations pre-COVID that to standardize on one system, probably the stock code system, would “take three years” to develop.<\/p>\n

“Three years” was the timeframe for a lot of things.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

I had a Word document that was filled with stock codes. About 150 items total. I had a spreadsheet with both stock codes and item codes. I needed to change the stock codes to item codes in the Word document. And doing it manually — looking up the stock code, replacing the stock code with the item code in the document — would take time.<\/p>\n

“Y’know<\/i>,” I thought, “there’s the Linux sed<\/code> command. That can replace text in a text file from the command line, and you don’t even have to open the file<\/i>…”<\/p>\n

But I didn’t have a text file. I had a Microsoft Word document. Sure, there’s text<\/i> in the Word document, unless Word did something to compress it or do weird formatting things with it. Would sed<\/code> work on that?<\/p>\n

Well, there was only one way to find out…<\/p>\n

I had my Word document, and I cobbled together the necessary command to try the first stock code I had to change…<\/p>\n

sed -i 's\/STL382233\/SEP250250\/g' manga.doc<\/code><\/p>\n

I ran the command in my terminal. I opened the document — if you can read the sed<\/code> command, yes, it’s a document about manga — and looked to see…<\/p>\n

It worked! It worked!<\/p>\n

As I said, I had a spreadsheet with both stock codes and item codes, and from there it was a trivial matter of writing a =CONCATENATE<\/code> function to write all the sed<\/code> commands I needed, which I would then run as a bash script in terminal.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

The script was run! The codes were changed, from stock to item!<\/p>\n

Many hours of tedious work was avoided.<\/p>\n

And I was still only on my first cup of coffee for the day.<\/p>\n

Even I am staggered sometimes by my own ingenuity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes I surprise myself with my own cleverness and creativity. Case in point… At Diamond, we maintain two completely different SKU systems to refer to inventory. There’s a stock code system (prefixed STK or STL), and there’s an item code system (prefixed in a MMMYY system, such as SEP25). Occasionally over the years I’ve beenContinue reading “A Little Ingenuity and a Bit of Code Make the World Go Round”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[4846,5140,5277,426],"class_list":["post-34597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-diamond-comic-distributors","tag-linux","tag-microsoft","tag-microsoft-word","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}