Question

I am trying to read from a file and match for a certain combination of strings. PFB my program:

def negative_verbs_features(filename):

    # Open and read the file content
    file = open (filename, "r")
    text = file.read()
    file.close()

    # Create a list of negative verbs from the MPQA lexicon
    file_negative_mpqa = open("../data/PolarLexicons/negative_mpqa.txt", "r")
    negative_verbs = []
    for line in file_negative_mpqa:
        #print line,
        pos, word = line.split(",")
        #print line.split(",")      
        if pos == "verb":
            negative_verbs.append(word)
    return negative_verbs

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print negative_verbs_features("../data/test.txt")

The file negative_mpqa.txt consists of word, part-of-speech tag pairs separated by a comma(,). Here’s a snippet of the file:

abandoned,adj
abandonment,noun
abandon,verb
abasement,anypos
abase,verb
abash,verb
abate,verb
abdicate,verb
aberration,adj
aberration,noun

I would like create a list of all words in the file which has verb as it’s part-of-speech. However, when I run my program and the list returned (negative_verbs) is always empty. The if loop wasn’t executing. I tried printing word,pos pair by uncommenting the line print line.split(“,”) PFB a snippet of the ouput.

['wrongful', 'adj\r\n']
['wrongly', 'anypos\r\n']
['wrought', 'adj\r\n']
['wrought', 'noun\r\n']
['yawn', 'noun\r\n']
['yawn', 'verb\r\n']
['yelp', 'verb\r\n']
['zealot', 'noun\r\n']
['zealous', 'adj\r\n']
['zealously', 'anypos\r\n']

I understand my file may have some special characters like newline and return feed at the end of every line. I just want to ignore them and build my list. Kindly let me know how to proceed.

PS: I am newbie in Python.

Answer 1

You said the file has lines like this: abandoned,adj so those are word, pos pairs. But you wrote pos, word = line.split(",") which means that pos == 'abandoned' and word == 'adj' … I think it’s clear why the list will be empty now 🙂