Question

I have a file having a few columns like:

PAIR 1MFK 1 URANIUM 82 HELIUM 112 2.5506  
PAIR 2JGH 2 PLUTONIUM 98 POTASSIUM 88 5.3003  
PAIR 345G 3 SODIUM 23 CARBON 14 1.664  
PAIR 4IG5 4 LITHIUM 82 ARGON 99 2.5506  
PAIR 234G 5 URANIUM 99 KRYPTON 89 1.664  

Now what I wanted to do is read the last column and iterate the values for repetitions and generate an output file containing two column 'VALUE' & 'NO OF TIMES REPEATED'.

I have tried like:

inp = ('filename'.'r').read().strip().replace('\t',' ').split('\n')
from collections import defaultdict
D = defaultdict(line)

for line in map(str.split,inp):
     k=line[-1]
     D[k].append(line)

I’m stuck here.
plaese help.!

Answer 1

There are a number of issues with the code as posted. A while-loop isn’t allowed inside a list comprehension. The argument to defaultdict should be list not line. Here is a fixed-up version of your code:

from collections import defaultdict
D = defaultdict(list)

for line in open('filename', 'r'):
    k = line.split()[-1]
    D[k].append(line)

print 'VALUE    NO TIMES REPEATED'
print '-----    -----------------'
for value, lines in D.items():
    print '%-6s           %d'  % (value, len(lines))

Another way to do it is to use collections.Counter to conveniently sum the number of repetitions. That let’s you simplify the code a bit:

from collections import Counter
D = Counter()

for line in open('filename', 'r'):
    k = line.split()[-1]
    D[k] += 1

print 'VALUE    NO TIMES REPEATED'
print '-----    -----------------'
for value, count in D.items():
    print '%-6s           %d'  % (value, count)