Question

I just started python, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I’m reading a table generated by another program and pulling out 2 numbers from each line, I’ll call them a and b. (they are saved as flux and observed in my program) I need to take these two numbers from each line and format them like this-

(a,b),(a,b),(a,b) ect. 

Each consecutive parenthesis is from the consecutive line, first a,b is from line 1, second a,b is from line 2, etc. I need to read the entire table however, the table length will vary.

This is what I have so far. It can read the table and pull out the numbers I need, however, I don’t know how to put the numbers into the proper format. I want to say something recursive would be most efficient but I’m unsure of how to do that. Thank you in advance.

#!/usr/bin/python

file = open("test_m.rdb")

 while 1:
    line = file.readline()
    i = line.split()
    flux = i[2]
    observed = i[4]
    if not line:
        break

Answer 1

with open("test_m.rdb") as inf:
    results = [(i[2],i[4]) for i in (line.split() for line in inf)]

result_string = ",".join(str(res) for res in results)

or a more general formatter:

result_string = ", ".join("('{2}', '{4}')".format(*res) for res in results)