Noobie Question reg Delimited Text

[nick777]

Hope the Community can bear with me as I muddle with the vocabulary since I am not really sure if I am going about this the correct way.

My question is as follows:

If I had some sample data in the form of delimited text, in this case comma-delimited (eg. canned_data.txt ) and the format looked roughly like this:

name,age,occupa tion,status
"joe blow",21,salesm an,married
"hanna montana,19,ente rtainer,single

etc...


I am confused with how to go about

1) importing this file into Python for reading line-by-line for eventual parsing,splitti ng, general manipulation to a new output file
2) the exact terminology/vocab (I have come across array,matrix,ta ble, etc.)


So far I would do something like this:

# start of my module
tInputName = raw_input("Enter the name of your delimited input file:") #canned_data.txt in the same directory as module
tOutputName= raw_input("Enter the name of your output file:")
getData = open(tInputName,r)
getData = input.readlines()
for line in getData
   getData = line.split(",") #my series of general data manipulation
   getData = line.upper #another eg of manipulation
output.writelines(tOutputName)
output.close()
if output.close == true
print "The file:", tOutputName, " was created"
raw_input()
else
output.close ==false
print "Failed creating  ", tOutputName
raw_input()

In a nutshell, could someone help me vett the above?
Sincerely,
Nick

[bvdet]

Please use code tags when posting code!!

Python for loops and if statements require a colon for proper syntax.
Example:

for name in nameList:
    print name
 
if name == "Fred":
    print "Fred's here."
else:
    print "I don't know this guy."

Generally, if an error occurs when opening, reading, or writing to a file, an IOError exception is raised. This error can be caught with a try/except block.
Example:

>>> try:
...     f = open('abc')
... except IOError, e:
...     print e
...     print e.errno, e.strerror, e.filename
...     
[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'abc'
2 No such file or directory abc
>>> 

File I/O seldom errors except when invalid file names or paths are attempted.

Following are examples of opening a file, manipulating the data, and writing to another file. The first example uses list comprehensions. The second is the equivalent without the list comprehensions.

infile = open('names.txt')
outfile = open('names_reversed.txt', 'w')
 
results = []
for line in infile:
    results.append([item for item in line.strip().split(',')[::-1]])
infile.close()
 
outfile.write('\n'.join([','.join(item) for item in results]))
outfile.close()
 
''' output file contents
status,occupation,age,name
married,salesman,21,joe blow
single,entertainer,19,hanna montana
'''
 
infile = open('names.txt')
outfile = open('names_reversed1.txt', 'w')
 
results = []
for line in infile:
    lineList = line.strip().split(',')
    lineList = lineList[::-1]
    results.append(lineList)
infile.close()
 
output = []
for item in results:
    output.append(','.join(item))
 
outfile.write('\n'.join(output))
outfile.close()