Hi
I think you've got the steps right. It's just a question of putting it all together. Python is almost certainly the right choice for you. A couple of things remain a little unclear to me.
1. the format of your data. For example if you open it with wordpad or some similar text editor what does it look like. You could try something like:
-
myFile = open("yourGISfilename.whatever","r")
-
for i,line in enumerate(myFile):
-
if i>10: break
-
print i, line
-
myFile.close()
-
This should print out the first ten lines of your file. Post back what you get and it will help us to determine whether this very basic approach will be sufficient, or if you need something more.
2. the decoding of your third column. This string is meaningless to me. However, if you know what it means, then extracting the plotable data should be quite easy. There are a number of tricks. Regular expressions is a common one - hugely powerful, but may take a minute to get your head around if you've not seen them before. Otherwise there are many other functions for fiddling around with strings.
By the time these two are done, the rest is pretty standard. But let's get to the point where you can extract the data, and then we'll move on to the next bit.
Best
