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Comment by kamjam | Hacker News Reader

Everything you mention can be done by a non-programmer.

- Copy and paste your list of charities into MS Word and print it - Not sure what that is about - Create a blog on one of the many readily available platforms like Wordpress or blogger. Plenty of non-coders already doing this - Getting a grasp on technology has nothing to do with coding

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What if your list is 10,000 and they are links on a paginated search results page? Cut and paste does not work here -scrapping sure will. Now think about what happens if the page is supported by dynamic tools like AJAX ?

How often does this actually need to be done? I know beginner coders who struggle with this, esp when it comes to AJAX. I very much doubt that someone with no interest in coding who is forced to code because of some government initiative for one semester is going to fare any better at that task.

The point is, unless you have some self interest in the subject then there is no point in forcing you to learn it, it is going to be of no benefit to you in your future life.

At work, I had a spreadsheet. Technical people, coders even, had a hard time finding the solution: convert to CSV, cut -f, awk print, in order to tack a hostname onto a column with relative HTTP paths. (No error checking required.)

If you were using Excel, you code have just written a VBA macro to do it, or created another column with formula =CONCATENATE("http://domain/",A1) if that's what you mean

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