Acclaim Badges to CSV

From previous blog posts like I’m a Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert or I’m a Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert you can see I like to celebrate when I pass another certification exam. I also link to the specific digital badge hosted on the Credly Acclaim platform. You can see all my badges at Kevin Hakanson - Badges - Acclaim.

However, I also wanted to celebrate my co-workers and was looking for an API to monitor whey they achieved additional certifications. I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, but I appending .json to that badges URL gave me what I needed.

https://www.youracclaim.com/users/kevin-hakanson/badges.json

So I did what builders do and wrote a utility script that can scrape this data and save to a .csv file. Check out the acclaim-badges-to-csv GitHub repo to see it in action.

A utility that calls into the JSON endpoint for a set of Acclaim user’s badges and builds up a CSV file.

But please don’t look to closely at my code, because I had to use a hack to get the Unicode byte order mark (BOM) into the .csv file. I ended up prefixing the Name column with the U+FEFF character resulting in the \ufeffName string below. This shouldn’t be strictly needed, except Excel wouldn’t display the file correctly without it.

const createCsvWriter = require('csv-writer').createArrayCsvWriter;
const csvWriter = createCsvWriter({
    header: ['\ufeffName', 'Issuer', 'Certification', 'Issued At', 'Expires At'],
    path: 'certifications.csv'
});