CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonfile
ibp4
ibp4

Reputation: 23

Read a specific word from a text file and then save the next word

I need to read from a text file that looks like this:

football 1
basketball 2
hockey 0
tennis 2
...

where there are x number of lines, each one with a sport and a number. I'm given a sport and i have to save the number of that sport in a variable, but i cant find a good way to do it.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2287

Answers (2)

RSHAP
RSHAP

Reputation: 2447

There're a few options here. The simplest is to just iterate through the file object using standard python. 

# This will only get the first occurrence
with open("sportfile.txt", "r") as f:
    for line in f:
        curr_sport, num = line.split()
        if curr_sport==sport:
            break

If you have multiple occurrences you can store the numbers in a list - or you can sum them if you don't need specificity... depends on the problem at hand.

sport = 'football' # for example
football_nums = []
with open("sportfile.txt", "r") as f:
    for line in f:
        curr_sport, num = line.split()
        if curr_sport==sport:
            football_nums.append(num)

See the docs "https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/inputoutput.html#reading-and-writing-files" for info on file handles in python.

If you need to translate the file into a python structure that you can query to find any sport and corresponding number you could use pandas (might be overkill but I love pandas :-))

df = pd.read_csv('sportfile.txt', sep = ' ')
df.columns = ['sport', 'num']
df[df.sport=='football'] # returns all rows where the sport is football.

pandas .read_csv() is crazy detailed and powerful: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_csv.html

Upvotes: 2

maxwu
maxwu

Reputation: 432

Feel free to try this. Just tested the quick sample in shell. 

import sys


if __name__ == '__main__':
    key = "football"
    for line in sys.stdin:
        sport, number = line.split()
        if sport == key:
            print "{}, {}".format(sport, number)
            break
    else:
        print "{} not found".format(key)

Upvotes: 0

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