reading numbers from text into variables in python - python

assume i have a text file that only has the following format where each line has two numbers separated by a space:
2 4
66 99
11 67
1 3
this is my code which i tried doing:
with open('text_file.txt') as file:
lines = []
for i in file:
lines.append(i)
print(lines)
the problem with my code is that it keeps printing "\n" with the numbers and i don't know how to get around that
i need a way to read only the two numbers in the last line and store each number in a variable, so for the example above:
var1 = 1 , var2 = 3.
i need this for a multi-threading program , where i am testing a "race condition" between three threads where each thread reads the last two numbers in the text file and read the last line of numbers, and then print the thread_ip in the first ,and increment the second from the previous last line and print it.
im not asking for help for the whole assignment, just the reading/writing the text file part is what i can't seem to figure out.

with open("example_file", "r") as fin:
var1, var2 = [int(i) for i in fin.readline().split()]
To store the last two numbers in the last line:
with open("example_file", "r") as fin:
var1, var2 = [int(i) for i in fin.readlines()[-1].split()]

So both of the examples in the currently accepted answer from izhang work, but they come with a cost... In the first example, you have to needlessly walk the entire file to come to the last line. And in the second example, you have to read the entire file into memory. If dealing with large datasets, and/or running inside of constrained containers, this will absolutely become a problem.
The better solution is to read the file backwards and break after the first read line. This is not an easy task to do from scratch, but fortunately, there is a module for that.
from file_read_backwards import FileReadBackwards
with FileReadBackwards('text_file.txt') as f:
for l in f:
var1, var2 = l.split()
break
print(var1, var2)

Related

Reading an nth line of a textfile in python determined from a list

I have a function gen_rand_index that generates a random group of numbers in list format, such as [3,1] or [3,2,1]
I also have a textfile that that reads something like this:
red $1
green $5
blue $6
How do I write a function so that once python generates this list of numbers, it automatically reads that # line in the text file? So if it generated [2,1], instead of printing [2,1] I would get "green $5, red $1" aka the second line in the text file and the first line in the text file?
I know that you can do print(line[2]) and commands like that, but this won't work in my case because each time I am getting a different random number of a line that I want to read, it is not a set line I want to read each time.
row = str(result[gen_rand_index]) #result[gen_rand_index] gives me the random list of numbers
file = open("Foodinventory.txt", 'r')
for line in file:
print(line[row])
file.close()
I have this so far, but I am getting this
error: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '[4, 1]'
I also have gotten
TypeError: string indices must be integers
butI have tried replacing str with int and many things like that but I'm thinking the way I'm just approaching this is wrong. Can anyone help me? (I have only been coding for a couple days now so I apologize in advance if this question is really basic)
Okay, let us first get some stuff out of the way
Whenever you access something from a list the thing you put inside the box brackets [] should be an integer, eg: [5]. This tells Python that you want the 5th element. It cannot ["5"] because 5 in this case would be treated as a string
Therefore the line row = str(result[gen_rand_index]) should actually just be row = ... without the call to str. This is why you got the TypeError about list indices
Secondly, as per your description gen_rand_index would return a list of numbers.
So going by that, why don;t you try this
indices_to_pull = gen_rand_index()
file_handle = open("Foodinventory.txt", 'r')
file_contents = file_handle.readlines() # If the file is small and simle this would work fine
answer = []
for index in indices_to_pull:
answer.append(file_contents[index-1])
Explanation
We get the indices of the file lines from gen_rand_index
we read the entire file into memory using readlines()
Then we get the lines we want, Rememebr to subtract 1 as the list is indexed from 0
The error you are getting is because you're trying to index a string variable (line) with a string index (row). Presumably row will contain something like '[2,3,1]'.
However, even if row was a numerical index, you're not indexing what you think you're indexing. The variable line is a string, and it contains (on any given iteration) one line of the file. Indexing this variable will give you a single character. For example, if line contains green $5, then line[2] will yield 'e'.
It looks like your intent is to index into a list of strings, which represent all the lines of the file.
If your file is not overly large, you can read the entire file into a list of lines, and then just index that array:
with open('file.txt') as fp:
lines = fp.readlines()
print(lines[2]).
In this case, lines[2] will yield the string 'blue $6\n'.
To discard the trailing newline, use lines[2].strip() instead.
I'll go line by line and raise some issues.
row = str(result[gen_rand_index]) #result[gen_rand_index] gives me the random list of numbers
Are you sure it is gen_rand_index and not gen_rand_index()? If gen_rand_index is a function, you should call the function. In the code you have, you are not calling the function, instead you are using the function directly as an index.
file = open("Foodinventory.txt", 'r')
for line in file:
print(line[row])
file.close()
The correct python idiom for opening a file and reading line by line is
with open("Foodinventory.txt.", "r") as f:
for line in f:
...
This way you do not have to close the file; the with clause does this for you automatically.
Now, what you want to do is to print the lines of the file that correspond to the elements in your variable row. So what you need is an if statement that checks if the line number you just read from the file corresponds to the line number in your array row.
with open("Foodinventory.txt", "r") as f:
for i, line in enumerate(f):
if i == row[i]:
print(line)
But this is wrong: it would work only if your list's elements are ordered. That is not the case in your question. So let's think a little bit. You could iterate over your file multiple times, and each time you iterate over it, print out one line. But this will be inefficient: it will take time O(nm) where n==len(row) and m == number of lines in your file.
A better solution is to read all the lines of the file and save them to an array, then print the corresponding indices from this array:
arr = []
with open("Foodinventory.txt", "r") as f:
arr = list(f)
for i in row:
print(arr[i - 1]) # arrays are zero-indiced

Issues reading two text files and calculating values

I have two text files with numbers that I want to do some very easy calculations on (for now). I though I would go with Python. I have two file readers for the two text files:
with open('one.txt', 'r') as one:
one_txt = one.readline()
print(one_txt)
with open('two.txt', 'r') as two:
two_txt = two.readline()
print(two_txt)
Now to the fun (and for me hard) part. I would like to loop trough all the numbers in the second text file and then subtract it with the second number in the first text file.
I have done this (extended the coded above):
with open('two.txt') as two_txt:
for line in two_txt:
print line;
I don't know how to proceed now, because I think that the second text file would need to be converted to string in order do make some parsing so I get the numbers I want. The text file (two.txt) looks like this:
Start,End
2432009028,2432009184,
2432065385,2432066027,
2432115011,2432115211,
2432165329,2432165433,
2432216134,2432216289,
2432266528,2432266667,
I want to loop trough this, ignore the Start,End (first line) and then once it loops only pick the first values before each comma, the result would be:
2432009028
2432065385
2432115011
2432165329
2432216134
2432266528
Which I would then subtract with the second value in one.txt (contains numbers only and no Strings what so ever) and print the result.
There are many ways to do string operations and I feel lost, for instance I don't know if the methods to read everything to memory are good or not.
Any examples on how to solve this problem would be very appreciated (I am open to different solutions)!
Edit: Forgot to point out, one.txt has values without any comma, like this:
102582
205335
350365
133565
Something like this
with open('one.txt', 'r') as one, open('two.txt', 'r') as two:
next(two) # skip first line in two.txt
for line_one, line_two in zip(one, two):
one_a = int(split(line_one, ",")[0])
two_b = int(split(line_two, " ")[1])
print(one_a - two_b)
Try this:
onearray = []
file = open("one.txt", "r")
for line in file:
onearray.append(int(line.replace("\n", "")))
file.close()
twoarray = []
file = open("two.txt", "r")
for line in file:
if line != "Start,End\n":
twoarray.append(int(line.split(",")[0]))
file.close()
for i in range(0, len(onearray)):
print(twoarray[i] - onearray[i])
It should do the job!

Python 3 How to add specific lines from a list to an array

Below is my code. This code reads lines from a file (called compsc), strips the \n from them, puts them into an array and randomly prints them, eliminating each option that has already been printed. What I want to know is how to read only a specific set of lines into the array, as I will have lots of lines in the .txt file. So, is there some code that can do that, or do I have to put readlines() somewhere?
Thanks in advance!
import random
with open("compsc.txt", "r") as ins:
qarray = []
for line in ins:
line = line.strip()
qarray.append(line)
print (qarray)
loop = 0
while loop != 4:
newquestion = random.sample(qarray, 1)
print (newquestion)
qarray.remove(newcard[0])
loop = loop + 1
You will need to create some function to decide whether or not to keep the line.
import random
def line_filter(line):
"""Return True if you want to keep line, False otherwise."""
...
with open("compsc.txt", "r") as f:
questions = [line.strip() for line in f if line_filter(line)]
random.shuffle(questions)
for question in questions[:4]:
print(question)
This has been covered on this site before. In brief, if your file is not huge i.e. does not cause memory problems you could indeed use readlines. Also look into linecache, which is optimized.

What qualifies collection of strings to become a line?

Following code is taking every character and running the loop as many times. But when I save the same line in a text file and perform same operation, the loop is only run once for 1 line. It is bit confusing. Possible reason I can think off is that first method is running the loop by considering "a" as a list. Kindly correct me if I am wrong. Also let me know how to create a line in code itself rather first saving it in a file and then using it.
>>> a="In this world\n"
>>> i=0
>>> for lines in a:
... i=i+1
... print i
...
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
You're trying to loop over a, which is a string. Regardless of how many newlines you have in a string, when you loop over it, you're going to go character by character.
If you want to loop through a bunch of lines, you have to use a list:
lines = ["this is line 1", "this is another line", "etc"]
for line in lines:
print line
If you have a string containing a bunch of newlines and want to convert it to a list of lines, use the split method:
text = "This is line 1\nThis is another line\netc"
lines = text.split("\n")
for line in lines:
print line
The reason why you go line by line when reading from a file is because the people who implemented Python decided that it would be more useful if iterating over a file yielded a collection of lines instead of a collection of characters.
However, a file and a string are different things, and you should not necessarily expect that they work in the same way.
Just change the name of the variable when looping on the line:
i = 0
worldLine ="In this world\n"
for character in worldLine:
i=i+1
print i
count = 0
readFile = open('myFile','r')
for line in readFile:
count += 1
now it should be clear what's going on.
Keeping meaningful names will save you a lot of debugging time.
Considering doing the following:
i = 0
worldLine =["In this world\n"]
for character in worldLine:
i=i+1
print i
if you want to loop on a list of lines consisting of worldLine only.

Trouble sorting a list with python

I'm somewhat new to python. I'm trying to sort through a list of strings and integers. The lists contains some symbols that need to be filtered out (i.e. ro!ad should end up road). Also, they are all on one line separated by a space. So I need to use 2 arguments; one for the input file and then the output file. It should be sorted with numbers first and then the words without the special characters each on a different line. I've been looking at loads of list functions but am having some trouble putting this together as I've never had to do anything like this. Any takers?
So far I have the basic stuff
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
try:
infilename = sys.argv[1] #outfilename = sys.argv[2]
except:
print "Usage: ",sys.argv[0], "infile outfile"; sys.exit(1)
ifile = open(infilename, 'r')
#ofile = open(outfilename, 'w')
data = ifile.readlines()
r = sorted(data, key=lambda item: (int(item.partition(' ')[0])
if item[0].isdigit() else float('inf'), item))
ifile.close()
print '\n'.join(r)
#ofile.writelines(r)
#ofile.close()
The output shows exactly what was in the file but exactly as the file is written and not sorted at all. The goal is to take a file (arg1.txt) and sort it and make a new file (arg2.txt) which will be cmd line variables. I used print in this case to speed up the editing but need to have it write to a file. That's why the output file areas are commented but feel free to tell me I'm stupid if I screwed that up, too! Thanks for any help!
When you have an issue like this, it's usually a good idea to check your data at various points throughout the program to make sure it looks the way you want it to. The issue here seems to be in the way you're reading in the file.
data = ifile.readlines()
is going to read in the entire file as a list of lines. But since all the entries you want to sort are on one line, this list will only have one entry. When you try to sort the list, you're passing a list of length 1, which is going to just return the same list regardless of what your key function is. Try changing the line to
data = ifile.readlines()[0].split()
You may not even need the key function any more since numbers are placed before letters by default. I don't see anything in your code to remove special characters though.
since they are on the same line you dont really need readlines
with open('some.txt') as f:
data = f.read() #now data = "item 1 item2 etc..."
you can use re to filter out unwanted characters
import re
data = "ro!ad"
fixed_data = re.sub("[!?#$]","",data)
partition maybe overkill
data = "hello 23frank sam wilbur"
my_list = data.split() # ["hello","23frank","sam","wilbur"]
print sorted(my_list)
however you will need to do more to force numbers to sort maybe something like
numbers = [x for x in my_list if x[0].isdigit()]
strings = [x for x in my_list if not x[0].isdigit()]
sorted_list = sorted(numbers,key=lambda x:int(re.sub("[^0-9]","",x))) + sorted(strings(
Also, they are all on one line separated by a space.
So your file contains a single line?
data = ifile.readlines()
This makes data into a list of the lines in your file. All 1 of them.
r = sorted(...)
This makes r the sorted version of that list.
To get the words from the line, you can .read() the entire file as a single string, and .split() it (by default, it splits on whitespace).

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