American LinkFinder

This converter takes a saved query file from the U.S. Census Bureau's American FactFinder and generates a deep link URL corresponding to that query.

There are two versions of the converter:

• One is a small Web application using the web.py framework.
• The other is a command-line Python script.

Command-line script

The command-line script (convert_aff.py) just takes the filename of a .aff query file as its sole argument and prints a URL to standard output.

Usage: ./convert_aff.py <foo.aff>

Web application

The Web application (deep_link.py) takes a POST-ed .aff query file and outputs a page with the corresponding URL in a link.

It also includes a basic requirements.txt (i.e., pip freeze) file and configuration files for Heroku hosting.

If you have the web.py framework installed, you can run this application locally: ./deep_link.py should print a local URL you can use to access it in your Web browser of choice.

Hosted version

Of course, if you'd rather not fiddle with any of those, there's a version up at link-aff.herokuapp.com.

Questions?

Email: justin at justinmyers dot net

Revision history

April 18, 2012:

• Switched from ep.io to Heroku (including provided configuration files) due to ep.io closing up shop

Feb. 25, 2012:

• Updated documentation with a bit more usage information

Jan. 13, 2012:

• Added support for product IDs with cat-group-spec-id attributes
• Moved conversion code into one module instead of duplicating it in command-line and web.py versions
• Moved from Gist to proper GitHub repo