Question

I’m writing a solution in MATLAB but am using Python to parse a text file – Python is definitely not my strong point. Basically, I’ve managed to parse my text file for relevant lines and would like these exported as a tab delimited text file in the following format:

num1    num2    num3    num4    num5
num1    num2    num3    num4    num5
num1    num2    num3    num4    num5
num1    num2    num3    num4    num5

However, at present, my output file looks like this:

[num3, num1, num2, num4, num5], [num3, num1, num2, num4, num5], [num3, num1, num2, num4, num5], [num3, num1, num2, num4, num5]

My code looks like this:

for <blah blah>
    num3,num1,num2,num4,num5 = data
    outputData.append(data)
outfile.write("%s"%(outputData))

How do I rearrange the variables and have them output into a nice structured array?

Answer 1

Try the following:

for <blah blah>
    num3,num1,num2,num4,num5 = data
    outputData.append('\t'.join(map(str, [num1, num2, num3, num4, num5])))

outfile.write('\n'.join(outputData))

The code '\t'.join(map(str, [num1, num2, num3, num4, num5])) will result in a tab-delimited string with the data in the correct order, so outputData will be a list of those strings. Then '\n'.join(outputData) will combine all of the lines from outputData with a newline separating each line, which is what you want to write to the file.

Alternatively you could get rid of outputData entirely and do something like this:

for <blah blah>
    num3,num1,num2,num4,num5 = data
    outfile.write('\t'.join(map(str, [num1, num2, num3, num4, num5])) + '\n')