Question

I have a text file containing tabular data. What I need to do is automate the task of writing to a new text file that is comma delimited instead of space delimited, extract a few columns from existing data, reorder the columns.

This is a snippet of the first 4 lines of the original data:

Number of rows: 8542
 Algorithm  |Date   |Time   |Longitude  |Latitude   |Country    
 1  2000-01-03  215926.688  -0.262  35.813  Algeria 
 1  2000-01-03  215926.828  -0.284  35.817  Algeria

Here is what I want in the end:

Longitude,Latitude,Country,Date,Time
-0.262,35.813,Algeria,2000-01-03,215926.688

Any tips on how to approach this?

Answer 1

I guess the file is separated by tabs, not spaces.

If so, you can try something like:

input_file = open('some_tab_separated_file.txt', 'r')
output_file = open('some_tab_separated_file.csv', 'w')
input_file.readline() # skip first line 
for line in input_file:
    (a, date, time, lon, lat, country) = line.strip().split('\t')
    output_file.write(','.join([lon, lat, country, date, time]) + '\n')
input_file.close()
output_file.close()

This code is untested, any bug is left for you as exercise.