On 08/08/07, Tim Finley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm a newbie to programming and am trying to learn Python. Maybe I'm wrong,
> but I thought a practical way of learning it would be to create a script. I
> want to automate the gathering of mailbox statistics for users in a post
> office. There are two lines containing this information for each user. I
> want to find the two lines for each user and place the information in a
> different file. I can't figure out how to find the information I'm after.
> Can you provide me an example or refer me to some place that has it?
Hi Tim,
My first step in approaching a problem like this would probably be to
parse the data. "parsing" means taking text data and adding structure
to it.
For example, suppose I had a data file "employees.csv" that looks like this:
1,joe,smith,ceo
2,fred,dagg,cio
3,karl,marx,cfo
where the data format is: id, first name, surname, job
I might proceed like this:
#-----
employees = {} # This is a dictionary. I will use this to
store the parsed information.
infile = open('employees.csv') # open the file for reading
for line in infile: # go through the input file, one line at a time
line = line.strip() # remove the newline character at the end
of each line
id, first, last, job = line.split(',') # split up line
around comma characters
employees[int(id)] = { 'first':first, 'last':last, 'job':job }
# store data in dictionary
#-----
Once we get to here, we can do things like this:
# What is employee 3's name?
print employees[3]['first'], employees[3]['last']
# What is employee 1's job?
print employees[1]['job']
This might not be the best data structure for you; it depends on what
your data looks like and what you want to do with it. Python also has
lists and tuples. I encourage you to go through the tutorial :-)
--
John.
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