Question

We basically have a large xcel file and what im trying to do is create a list that has the maximum and minimum values of each column. there are 13 columns which is why the while loop should stop once it hits 14. the problem is once the counter is increased it does not seem to iterate through the for loop once. Or more explicitly,the while loop only goes through the for loop once yet it does seem to loop in that it increases the counter by 1 and stops at 14. it should be noted that the rows in the input file are strings of numbers which is why I convert them to tuples and than check to see if the value in the given position is greater than the column_max or smaller than the column_min. if so I reassign either column_max or column_min.Once this is completed the column_max and column_min are appended to a list( l ) andthe counter,(position), is increased to repeat the next column. Any help will be appreciated.

input_file = open('names.csv','r')
l= []  
column_max = 0
column_min = 0
counter = 0
while counter<14:
    for row in input_file:
        row = row.strip()
        row = row.split(',')
        row = tuple(row)
        if (float(row[counter]))>column_max:
            column_max = float(row[counter])  
        elif (float(row[counter]))<column_min:
            column_min = float(row[counter])    
        else:
            column_min=column_min
            column_max = column_max
    l.append((column_max,column_min))
    counter = counter + 1

Answer 1

Once you have consumed the file, it has been consumed. Thus iterating over it again won’t produce anything.

>>> for row in input_file:
...     print row
1,2,3,...
4,5,6,...
etc.
>>> for row in input_file:
...     print row
>>> # Nothing gets printed, the file is consumed

That is the reason why your code is not working.

You then have three main approaches:

1. Read the file each time (inefficient in I/O operations);
2. Load it into a list (inefficient for large files, as it stores the whole file in memory);
3. Rework the logic to operate line by line (quite feasible and efficient, though not as brief in code as loading it all into a two-dimensional structure and transposing it and using min and max may be).

Here is my technique for the third approach:

maxima = [float('-inf')] * 13
minima = [float('inf')] * 13
with open('names.csv') as input_file:
    for row in input_file:
        for col, value in row.split(','):
            value = float(value)
            maxima[col] = max(maxima[col], value)
            minima[col] = min(minima[col], value)

# This gets the value you called ``l``
combined_max_and_min = zip(maxima, minima)