Question

I have a text file that looks something like this where the first column is a student’s name, the second column is the number of credits, and the third is the number of points (grade times hours).

john    5    15
bill    9    30
ted    7    22

I want to create a class that extracts the relevant information and calculates gpa.

class Student:

    def __init__(self, name, hours, qpoints):
        self.name = name
        self.hours = float(hours)
        self.qpoints = float(qpoints)

    def getName(self):
        return self.name

    def getHours(self):
        return self.hours

    def getQPoints(self):
        return self.qpoints

    def gps(self):
        return self.qpoints/self.hours

used to make extract the data (based on the fact that there is a tab between each piece of information)

def makeStudent(info):
    name, hours, qpoints = info.split("\t")
    return Student(name, hours, qpoints)

here I use a for loop to create a list based on the data in the text file by appending the relevant information from each line to the list

def readStudents(filename):
    infile = open(filename, 'r')
    students = []
    for line in infile:
        students.append(makeStudent(line))
    infile.close()
    return students

the problem is that I get this error:

[<__main__.Student object at 0x01FA4AD0>, <__main__.Student object at 0x01FA4AF0>,
 <__main__.Student object at 0x01FA4B10>, <__main__.Student object at 0x01FA4B50>, 
 <__main__.Student object at 0x01FA4B30>]

Any ideas on why this is happening?

Answer 1

This is not an error. It is regular output. You should override the __str__ and __repr__ methods of the Student class, to tell python how to print Student objects.

Some help on your code, this is much better:

def readStudents(filename):
    with open(filename) as student_file:
        return [Student(*line.split()) for line in student_file]