Entry

ASCII delimited files

Jul 5th, 2000 10:02
Nathan Wallace, Hans Nowak, Snippet 290, Roger Irwin

"""
Packages: text.delimited_files
"""
"""
Thanks to everybody who sent me suggestions for reading delimited ASCII files
last week. As there was no standard funtion for doing what I wanted I wrote my
own, but as this could be very useful to a lot of other people (if nothing alse
for reading in data from spreadsheets), I thought others might like a copy of
this simple function:
(Note, this is more orientated towards the requirements of general data tables
rather than mathematical data sets).
"""
pdict={}
def parsedata(ftr,delim=';',offset=0,strip=1):
	"Read a delimited ASCII file into a dictionary"
	"After opening the file and reading in any header lines,"
	"this function can be used with ftr= to the open file object"
	"The delim parameter is obvious whilst the offset points to"
	"the field to be used as the key."
	"If strip is true, then if a field starts with a quotation"
	"the first and last character will ripped off the field."
	"A line with no delimiter will be regarded as a comment"
	"Stops reading as soon as a control character is encountered"
	"Returns number of records read"
	counter=0
	while 1:
		foo=ftr.readline()
		if foo=='':
			break		
		start=0
		buf=[]
		parsetab=[]
		for each in range(len(foo)):
			if foo[each]==delim:
				if (foo[start]=='"')|(foo[start]=="'"):
					parsetab.append(foo[start+1:each-1])
				else:
					parsetab.append(foo[start:each])
				start=each+1
			elif foo[each]<' ':
				if start:
					if (foo[start]=='"')|(foo[start]=="'"):
						parsetab.append(foo[start+1:each-1])
					else:
						parsetab.append(foo[start:each])
				break
		if start:
			pdict[parsetab[offset]]=parsetab	
			counter=counter+1
	return counter