Question

I know this is simple, but I’m a new user to Python so I’m having a bit of trouble here. I’m using Python 3 by the way.

I have multiple files that look something like this:

NAME DATE AGE SEX COLOR

Name Date Age Sex Color
Ray  May  25.1 M  Gray
Alex Apr  22.3 F  Green
Ann  Jun  15.7 F  Blue

(Pretend this is tab delimited. I should add that the real file will have about 3,000 rows and 17-18 columns)

What I want to do is select all the rows which have a value in the age column which is less than 23.

In this example, the output would be:

Name Date Age Sex Color
Alex Apr  22.3 F  Green
Ann  Jun  15.7 F  Blue

Here’s what I tried to do:

f = open("addressbook1.txt",'r')
line = f.readlines()
file_data =[line.split("\t")]
f.close()

for name, date, age, sex, color in file_data:
    if age in line_data < 23:
        g = open("college_age.txt",'a')
        g.write(line)
    else:
        h = open("adult_age.txt",'a')
        h.write(line)

Now, ideally, I have 20-30 of these “addressbook” inputfiles and I wanted this script to loop through them all and add all the entries with an age under 23 to the same output file (“college_age.txt”). I really don’t need to keep the other lines, but I didn’t know what else to do with them.

This script, when I run it, generates an error.

AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'split'

Then I change the third line to:

file_data=[line.split("\t") for line in f.readlines()]

And it no longer gives me an error, but simply does nothing at all. It just starts and then starts.

Any help? 🙂 Remember I’m dumb with Python.

I should have added that my actual data has decimals and are not integers. I have edited the data above to reflect that.

Answer 1

The issue here is that you are using readlines() twice, which means that the data is read the first time, then nothing is left the second time.

You can iterate directly over the file without using readlines() – in fact, this is the better way, as it doesn’t read the whole file in at once.

While you could do what you are trying to do by using str.split() as you have, the better option is to use the csv module, which is designed for the task.

import csv

with open("addressbook1.txt") as input, open("college_age.txt", "w") as college, open("adult_age.txt", "w") as adult:
   reader = csv.DictReader(input, dialect="excel-tab")
   fieldnames = reader.fieldnames
   writer_college = csv.DictWriter(college, fieldnames, dialect="excel-tab")
   writer_adult = csv.DictWriter(adult, fieldnames, dialect="excel-tab")
   writer_college.writeheader()
   writer_adult.writeheader()
   for row in reader:
       if int(row["Age"]) < 23:
          writer_college.writerow(row)
       else:
          writer_adult.writerow(row)

So what are we doing here? First of all we use the with statement for opening files. It’s not only more pythonic and readable but handles closing for you, even when exceptions occur.

Next we create a DictReader that reads rows from the file as dictionaries, automatically using the first row as the field names. We then make writers to write back to our split files, and write the headers in. Using the DictReader is a matter of preference. It’s generally used more where you access the data a lot (and when you don’t know the order of the columns), but it makes the code nice a readable here. You could, however, just use a standard csv.reader().

Next we loop through the rows in the file, checking the age (which we convert to an int so we can do a numerical comparison) to know what file to write to. The with statement closes out files for us.

For multiple input files:

import csv

fieldnames = ["Name", "Date", "Age", "Sex", "Color"]
filenames = ["addressbook1.txt", "addressbook2.txt", ...]

with open("college_age.txt", "w") as college, open("adult_age.txt", "w") as adult:
   writer_college = csv.DictWriter(college, fieldnames, dialect="excel-tab")
   writer_adult = csv.DictWriter(adult, fieldnames, dialect="excel-tab")
   writer_college.writeheader()
   writer_adult.writeheader()
   for filename in filenames:
       with open(filename, "r") as input:
           reader = csv.DictReader(input, dialect="excel-tab")
           for row in reader:
               if int(row["Age"]) < 23:
                  writer_college.writerow(row)
               else:
                  writer_adult.writerow(row)

We just add a loop in to work over multiple files. Please note that I also added a list of field names. Before I just used the fields and order from the file, but as we have multiple files, I figured it would be more sensible to do that here. An alternative would be to use the first file to get the field names.