Question

I am new to python and I have a question about a piece of python code that creates a cleaned up output file from a model output file. This code was written for a Mac user, but now I want to run it in Windows. But it gives an error message. Could you help me in converting this code so I can use it in Windows? Thanks.

import sys

if len(sys.argv) > 1:
  fileName = sys.argv[1]
else:
  print "selected_um_b.out" #insert file name here
  sys.exit()

f = open(fileName)
counter = 0

fw = open(fileName+".cleaned", 'w')

for line in f:
   line = line.strip()
   counter = counter + 1
   if counter <= 4:
      fw.write(line+"\n");
      continue
   values = line.split("\t")
   if (values[4].strip() == "-99" or values[5].strip() == "0"): continue
   fw.write("\t".join(values)+"\n")

f.close()

Update

The error message is:

Traceback (most recent call last): File
“C:\trial_batch\clean_output.py”, line 7, in sys.exit()
SystemExit

Answer 1

The program expects a filename on the command line when you execute it. It appears you did not provide one, so the program exited (the sys.exit() call terminates the program).

How are you trying to use it? If you just want to convert one file, put the file and the Python script into the same directory. Replace lines 3 through 7 with filename = "yourfilename.typ" (do not indent the line); it will read the file (“yourfilename.typ” in my example) and write an output file with ‘cleaned’ in the filename.