The problem: Realising that Amazon S3 (which I host my website on) does not support PHP and I need to host a form for a Language Acquisition experiment.
The solution: The pipeline I set up, which works as follows:
- Create a web form as you would normally using
inputHTML elements. - Make it instantly awesome by using formspree.io, which allows you to receive answers to your form directly to your inbox.
- Set up a filter in Gmail telling it to label emails from formspree and have them skip the inbox.
- Run the following Python script to harvest the data into a csv file.
Note: you will first need to sign up for and create an API instance from the Google Developers Console before being able to access Gmail programmatically as detailed here.
First, we import a handful of modules which will allow us to deal with accessing a Gmail account, reading raw email (in base64) and writing a csv. We also load API keys from a .json file stored locally.
There are three functions in the script:
getCredentials()is largely based off code provided by Google to interface with the API here.getLabel()Will search for emails with the label specified by the variablequery. It then fetches the id of those emails and returns a list of those id numbers,l_id.getData()first downloads the emails corresponding to the id numbers inl_id. It then searches through them with regexes to match the relevant data submitted by participants (note: enabling formspree's plaintext flag makes this part easier). Lastly, it writes a csv in which each line corresponds to the data given by a single participant.