Subtracting units in an array from themselves

[Miguel Valenzue]

I have a list of coordinates and am trying to ouptput the distance between each coordinate into a new list.

((x1,y1,z1),(x2,y2,z2),...)

End resulst

((x2-x1),(y2-y1),(z2-z1)),...

Thus far my strategy is to use the enumerate function to create a new array offset from the original array, and then subtract them.

#creates a list called dataList from and external coordinates file
dataList = [[float(s) for s in item.strip().split(",")] for item in open("coordinates.txt").readlines()]
 
#creates an empty new array
new_array=[]
 
#enumerates the list
for i,points in enumerate(dataList):
  x,y,z = points
  x2,y2,z2 = dataList[i+1]
  new_array.append((x2-x, y2-y, z2-z))
 
print new_array
 
 

I get the following error:
File "C:\Python27\coordinate scheme.py", line 9, in <module>
x2,y2,z2 = dataList[i+1]
IndexError: list index out of range

I'm new at Python and especially workining with nested lists and am stuck on where to go from here.
Can you make recommendations on how to address this? Not really sure what list index out of range refers too.
Thanks

[bvdet]

It appears that you have a list of lists, and each sublist has 3 elements of type float. If you use enumerate, each sublist is processed from the first to the very last. When the last sublist is processed and you attempt to extract the next element which does not exist (dataList[i+1]), you will receive the index error. You can use range(len(dataList)-1), add a try/except block, etc. to get around the error.