Anyone know how to code Python?

[mykalberta]

I am trying to help my cuz who is taking it in an adv High School programming class. I have only ever taken Java and C++ so Python is sort of new to me and doesnt seem as structured

He has the following data in different text files: Calgary, Edmonton, etc

FNameLName community CommunityName (all on 1 line all in this same format)

JamesPuck community Evergreen
RobNewsome community Varsity

He wants to parse the list and get rid of the community placeholder so he can use the dictionary function to compare and count

People who live in Evergreen: JamesPuck, ...
Number of people who live in Evergreen: X
Number of peple who live in textfile_Calgary: X

We have got this far:

import text ('data.txt','r')
words=text.split() #words list
print(words)

This gets us a list: 'JamesPuck', 'community', 'Evergreen', 'RobNewsome', 'Community', 'Mulletville'

He wants to use dictionary but with community we cant seem to remove it from the list. If we can then we can simply compare Name to CommunityName

Any tips or help would be appreciated

[BlackEleven]

Just filter it out in the split:
words=text.split(" community ")

[BlackEleven]

And a tip to get you a little further: you'll want to turn that list into a dictionary to answer those questions you posted. I'll spoiler it in case you want to figure it out on your own.

Spoiler!

The easiest way is to use zip and slicing. Slicing allows you to specify ranges or portions or a list (in this case every even and every odd element) and zip will transform the two lists into list of tuples (ie paris), which you can then use to make a dictionary ( first element in the tuple becomes the key, the second becomes the item).

Something like this:
communityDict = dict( zip( words[::2], words[1::2] ) )

[comrade]

Originally Posted by BlackEleven

Just filter it out in the split:
words=text.split(" community ")

Won't that result in ["JamesPuck", "Evergreen RobNewsome", "Varsity"]?

[mykalberta]

We tried that, the default for split() removes whitespaces and \n, if you replace then it wont remove the whitespaces and \n

If we replace () with (' community ') then we get something weird like this:

Orig Data
JamesPuck community Evergreen
RobNewsome community Varsity

split() = 'JamesPuck', 'community', 'Evergreen', 'RobNewsome', 'Community', 'Varsity'
split(' community ') = 'JamesPuck ',' Evergreen/nRobNewsome ',' Varsity/n'

[BlackEleven]

Oh right, didn't think about the newlines.

Perhaps the easiest way is just to iterate line by line. This will give you something to start on:

communityDict = {}
communityFile = open( filePath, "r" )
for line in communityFile.readlines():
   if ( "community" in line ):
      communityDict[ line.split("community")[0].strip() ] = line.split("community")[1].strip()

Edit: Disclaimer: I didn't try this nor am I a Python programmer ( I do C++), this is off the top of my head.

[BlackEleven]

If you prefer your original methodology you could use regular expressions instead of split to do the parsing, but for someone learning programming I'd recommend using the simple method I posted above. It's easier to understand when you're learning.

[FlamesPuck12]

Late to the party but here's my contribution. I don't like using the imperative approach to solve this problem in Python.

Try using the dictionary constructor for this problem.

d = dict(line.strip().split(' community ') for line in open('data.txt'))