Question

I have a lot of tab delimited data that is organized into multiple rows and should be all in two rows. Now it looks like this:

    Some Key    Other key   Foo Key    Bar Key
     0           5           18         12

    More Key    Dor key     Gee Key    Francis Scott  Key
     19          14          8          0

    Wa Key      Whis key    Don Key    Luh Key
     0           2           8          16

And I need it to look like this:

    Some Key    Other key   Foo Key    Bar Key    More Key    Dor key     Gee Key    Francis Scott  Key    Wa Key      Whis key    Don Key    Luh Key
     0           5           18         12         19          14          8          0                    0           2           8          16

I’ve got a few hundred csv files with about 20 rows each, 30 columns, so I want to script my way through this as much as possible. I’m using Python CSV, but I can’t figure out how to explain myself to it.

Answer 1

This should do it:

import csv
import sys

keys = []
values = []

reader = csv.reader(sys.stdin, delimiter="\t")
for row in reader:
    keys.extend(row)
    values.extend(next(reader))

    # skip empty line
    assert next(reader, []) == []

writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout, delimiter="\t")
writer.writerow(keys)
writer.writerow(values)

Save this as thingie.py and run it with python thingie.py < sample.csv (where “sample.csv” is your data file)