Question

I’m trying to complete a Project that will show total annual sales from an specific list contained in a .txt file.

The list is formatted this way:

-lastname, firstname (string)
-45.7 (float)
-456.4 (float)
-345.5 (float)
-lastname2, firstname2 (string)
-3354.7 (float)
-54.6 (float)
-56.2 (float)
-lastname3, firstname3 (string)
-76.6 (float)
-34.2 (float)
-48.2 (float)

And so on…. Actually, 7 different “employees” followed by 12 set of “numbers” (months of the year)….but that example should suffice to give an idea of what I’m trying to do.

I need to output this specific information of every “employee”
-Name of employee
-Total Sum (sum of the 12 numbers in the list)

So my logic is taking me to this conclusion, but I don’t know where to start:

Create 7 different arrays to store each “employee” data.
With this logic, I need to split the main list into independent arrays so I can work with them.

How can this be achieved? And also, if I don’t have a predefined number of employees (but a defined format :: “Name” followed by 12 months of numbers)…how can I achieve this?

I’m sure I can figure once I get an idea how to “split” a list in different sections — Every 13 lines?

Answer 1

I would not create 7 different arrays. I would create some sort of data structure to hold all the relevant information for one employee in one data type (this is python, but surely you can create data structures in python as well).

Then, as you process the data for each employee, all you have to do is iterate over one array of employee data elements. That way, it’s much easier to keep track of the indices of the data (or maybe even eliminates the need to!).

This is especially helpful if you want to sort the data somehow. That way, you’d only have to sort one array instead of 7.