Question

I have a tab delimited table that has multiple columns (1500) and a few rows (10).

Basically how do I make my program look at the columns instead of through the rows? I need to count and organize the columns based on whats in them.

One example is counting how many entries are in the columns that are not ‘-‘.

I think itertools.groupby may be what I’m looking for but I don’t know the syntax or if it is even the right thing.

I have been learning programming/python for two weeks so I don’t know how to do a lot. Thank you for any help you can give me.

Answer 1

Thank you everyone for your help! I tried each of them and they all did as described and could probably be incorporated into my code (if I was better at python). What I found to work the best for what I was doing to the columns was this:

table = []
for each_line in homefile:
##doesn't include first line
        arr1 = each_line.strip("\n").split('\t')
        table.append(arr1)
##created a list of lists(matrix); each row as one entry in table(list)
cols = zip(*table)
##this switches rows and columns

Then I was able to do stuff to each column while just treating each as a list containing the entries from each column of the original tab delimited table.