Question

Im very very new to python, I’m using it here as Im told it’s good for fileIO.

I have a CSV file in the following format. It records the daily activity for my staff.

---

Date, Name, Project, Manager

01/01/10, Tommy, HyperDyne, Joe Bloggs

01/01/10, Sue, Robot, Joe Bloggs

01/01/10, Mark, HyperDyne, Joe Bloggs

02/01/10, Tommy, SICK,

03/01/10, Tommy, HyperDyne, Joe Bloggs

---

When an employee is marked as SICK, the manager field is always blank. I want to fill in the Manager field with the previous manager entry for that employee. I want to fill in all the blanks in the csv, and put in NULLS when we cannot say.

In pseudocode-ish:

Forall lines n
if n.Project = "Sick"
  y = 1
  if n-y.name = n.name
      n.manager = n-y.manager
  else y++
  if y > n
      n.manager = null

(could probably wrap that into a for y < n loop perhaps)

This would need to be either edit the input file, or output a new file. I suspect editing the input file would be easier, as people can be sick multiple days in a row.

Would love some advice, its been ages since Ive done procedural programming

Answer 1

You could go through each line of input.csv, read + check it and then write it to output csv.
While you loop through the lines, keep a record of the previous manager for each person.
When you encounter a ‘SICK’ row, lookup the previous manager in your records

Here’s some incpomplete code to illustrate:

previous_managers = dict()
for line in csv:
    name = line.name
    project = line.project
    manager = line .manager

    if project == 'SICK':
        manager = previous_managers[person] or 'NULL'
    else:
        previous_managers[person] = manager

    write(name, project, manager)