Develop Reference

Python convert list into split lists

so I have been given the task of using an api to pull student records and learnerID's to put into an in house application. The json formatting is dreadful and the only successful way I managed to split students individually is by the last value.
Now I am at the next stumbling block, I need to split these student lists into smaller sections so I implement a for loop as so:
student = request.text.split('"SENMajorNeedsDetails"')
for students in student:
r = str(student).split(',')
print (student[0], student[1])
print (r[0], r[1])
This works perfectly except this puts it all into a single list again and each student record isn't a set length (some have more values/fields than others).
so what I am looking to do is have a list for each student split on the comma, so student1 would equal [learnerID,personID,name,etc...]
this way when I want to reference the learnerID I can call learner1[0]
It is also very possible that I am going about this the wrong way and I should be doing some other form of list comprehension
my step by step process that I am aiming towards is:
pull data from system - DONE
split data into individual students - DONE
take learnerID,name,group of each student and add database entry
I have split step 3 into two stages where one involves my issue above and the second is the create database records
Below is a shortended example of the list item student[0], followed by student[1] if more is needed then say
:null},{"LearnerId":XXXXXX,"PersonId":XXXXXX,"LearnerCode":"XXXX-XXXXXX","UPN":"XXXXXXXXXXX","ULN":"XXXXXXXXXX","Surname":"XXXXX","Forename":"XXXXX","LegalSurname":"XXXXX","LegalForename":"XXXXXX","DateOfBirth":"XX/XX/XXXX 00:00:00","Year":"XX","Course":"KS5","DateOfEntry":"XX/XX/XXXX 00:00:00","Gender":"X","RegGroup":"1XX",],
:null},{"LearnerId":YYYYYYY,"PersonId":YYYYYYYY,"LearnerCode":"XXXX-YYYYYYYY","UPN":"YYYYYYYYYY","ULN":"YYYYYYYYYY","Surname":"YYYYYYYY","Forename":"YYYYYY","LegalSurname":"YYYYYY","LegalForename":"YYYYYYY","DateOfBirth":"XX/XX/XXXX 00:00:00","Year":"XX","Course":"KS5","DateOfEntry":"XX/XX/XXXX 00:00:00","Gender":"X","RegGroup":"1YY",],
Sorry doesn't like putting it on seperate lines
EDIT* changed wording at the end and added a redacted student record

Just to clarify the resolution to my issue was to learn how to parse JSON propperly, this was pointed out by #Patrick Haugh and all credit should go to him for pointing me in the right direction. Second most helpful person was #ArndtJonasson
The problem was that I was manually trying to do the job of the JSON library and I am no where near that level of competency yet. As stated originally it was totally likely that I was going about it in completely the wrong way.

How to impliment a binary search on a list created from a file

This is my first post, please be gentle. I'm attempting to sort some
files into ascending and descending order. Once I have sorted a file, I am storing it in a list which is assigned to a variable. The user is then to choose a file and search for an item. I get an error message....
TypeError: unorderable types; int() < list()
.....when ever I try to search for an item using the variable of my sorted list, the error occurs on line 27 of my code. From research, I know that an int and list cannot be compared, but I cant for the life of me think how else to search a large (600) list for an item.
At the moment I'm just playing around with binary search to get used to it.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
year = []
with open("Year_1.txt") as file:
for line in file:
line = line.strip()
year.append(line)
def selectionSort(alist):
for fillslot in range(len(alist)-1,0,-1):
positionOfMax=0
for location in range(1,fillslot+1):
if alist[location]>alist[positionOfMax]:
positionOfMax = location
temp = alist[fillslot]
alist[fillslot] = alist[positionOfMax]
alist[positionOfMax] = temp
def binarySearch(alist, item):
first = 0
last = len(alist)-1
found = False
while first<=last and not found:
midpoint = (first + last)//2
if alist[midpoint] == item:
found = True
else:
if item < alist[midpoint]:
last = midpoint-1
else:
first = midpoint+1
return found
selectionSort(year)
testlist = []
testlist.append(year)
print(binarySearch(testlist, 2014))
Year_1.txt file consists of 600 items, all years in the format of 2016.
They are listed in descending order and start at 2017, down to 2013. Hope that makes sense.

Is there some reason you're not using the Python: bisect module?
Something like:
import bisect
sorted_year = list()
for each in year:
bisect.insort(sorted_year, each)
... is sufficient to create the sorted list. Then you can search it using functions such as those in the documentation.
(Actually you could just use year.sort() to sort the list in-place ... bisect.insort() might be marginally more efficient for building the list from the input stream in lieu of your call to year.append() ... but my point about using the `bisect module remains).
Also note that 600 items is trivial for modern computing platforms. Even 6,000 won't take but a few milliseconds. On my laptop sorting 600,000 random integers takes about 180ms and similar sized strings still takes under 200ms.
So you're probably not gaining anything by sorting this list in this application at that data scale.
On the other hand Python also includes a number of modules in its standard libraries for managing structured data and data files. For example you could use Python: SQLite3.
Using this you'd use standard SQL DDL (data definition language) to describe your data structure and schema, SQL DML (data manipulation language: INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements) to manage the contents of the data and SQL queries to fetch data from it. Your data can be returned sorted on any column and any mixture of ascending and descending on any number of columns with the standard SQL ORDER BY clauses and you can add indexes to your schema to ensure that the data is stored in a manner to enable efficient querying and traversal (table scans) in any order on any key(s) you choose.
Because Python includes SQLite in its standard libraries, and because SQLite provides SQL client/server semantics over simple local files ... there's almost no downside to using it for structured data. It's not like you have to install and maintain additional software, servers, handle network connections to a remote database server nor any of that.

I'm going to walk through some steps before getting to the answer.
You need to post a [mcve]. Instead of telling us to read from "Year1.txt", which we don't have, you need to put the list itself in the code. Do you NEED 600 entries to get the error in your code? No. This is sufficient:
year = ["2001", "2002", "2003"]
If you really need 600 entries, then provide them. Either post the actual data, or
year = [str(x) for x in range(2017-600, 2017)]
The code you post needs to be Cut, Paste, Boom - reproduces the error on my computer just like that.
selectionSort is completely irrelevant to the question, so delete it from the question entirely. In fact, since you say the input was already sorted, I'm not sure what selectionSort is actually supposed to do in your code, either. :)
Next you say testlist = [].append(year). USE YOUR DEBUGGER before you ask here. Simply looking at the value in your variable would have made a problem obvious.
How to append list to second list (concatenate lists)
Fixing that means you now have a list of things to search. Before you were searching a list to see if 2014 matched the one thing in there, which was a complete list of all the years.
Now we get into binarySearch. If you look at the variables, you see you are comparing the integer 2014 with some string, maybe "1716", and the answer to that is useless, if it even lets you do that (I have python 2.7 so I am not sure exactly what you get there). But the point is you can't find the integer 2014 in a list of strings, so it will always return False.
If you don't have a debugger, then you can place strategic print statements like
print ("debug info: binarySearch comparing ", item, alist[midpoint])
Now here, what VBB said in comments worked for me, after I fixed the other problems. If you are searching for something that isn't even in the list, and expecting True, that's wrong. Searching for "2014" returns True, if you provide the correct list to search. Alternatively, you could force it to string and then search for it. You could force all the years to int during the input phase. But the int 2014 is not the same as the string "2014".

Defining/algorithm, python

Recently I started to learn python.
There was a need for the program.
Please point the track :
The program takes two values from a file: the enterprise and the number of people in them.
Next i need to make the following calculating : finding company with the fewest people - > define it as one part of all - > count ratio is less than all other companies - > count of the number of rations for some time, uniformly.
First, I don't know, what i need to do first. Should i define all data like this "Company = numbers", or do a dict?
I don't ask to solve the problem - I ask to teach.
B.R.

for your example if you want to keep it as easy as possible put all your data in dicts you don't need to create database or file to store the data, for each entity you have to create its variable as dict and make the relationship between them with id like this : we assume that we have client and orders entities:
client = {
1:{"name":"name_1","email":"name_1#gmail.com"},
2:{"name":"name_2","email":"name_2#gmail.com"}
}
orders={1:{"date":"2016-02-01","client_id":1}...}
and so on.

comparing list item integers python

I am writing a program which saves the last 3 scores in a text file for each user of my game. I have already written the code that saves it I am now bringing the data back into the program which will work out the users high scores . I also already have the scores saved in separate lists All users 1st score saved in 1 list all users 2nd score in another and the same for 3rd score. I am trying to put these in their own high score list so when I joint the lists with the names(in another list) I will be able to sort by score but will be attached to name.
Bellow is the code I have written:
for i in range (2):
if score1[i] > score2[i] or score1[i]> score3[i]:
highscores.append(score1[i])
elif score2[i] > score1[i] or score2[i] > score3[i]:
highscores.append(score2[i])
elif score3[i] > score1[i] or score3[i] > score2[i]:
highscores.append(score3[i])
By the way it is in a for loop for i in range 2 as their are currently only 2 users. I know I'm being incredibly stupid by having the or as it means only one event needs to be true for it to work but when I tried and it didn't work either. Please work along these lines as my tutor said 'I had the right idea' I also hope this helps anyone else which is comparing list items with integers in python as I couldn't find anything on the internet .
Thanks,
I await guidance

You want to use and, not or.
You can also use a < b < c syntax instead of using and.
What you should really do is use Python's built-in max function. A clean, single-liner instead of that 6-line if-elif block.
highscores.append(max(score1[i], score2[i], score3[i]))

Probably not allowed for this assignment, but for others who need to do something similar, the easy/fast way to select the top 3 values from a large sequence of values is to use heapq.nlargest. If you have multiple sequences, you can itertools.chain them to avoid concatenating (avoid increases in peak memory usage). You can even attach the names (with zip and itertools.repeat) to each input sequence so the selected high scores include the associated user:
from heapq import nlargest
from itertools import chain, repeat
highscores = nlargest(3, chain(zip(score1, repeat('user1')),
zip(score2, repeat('user2')),
zip(score3, repeat('user3'))))
highscores would then be a list with three elements (from highest to lowest score, ties broken by user name), each element being a tuple of the form (score, username).

Appending to lists, with variables. Python

I have made a math quiz(simple.asks 10 maths question to the user). I made the user take the quiz 3 times using a for loop, because i needed 3 scores for each student.I decided to store the 3 scores in a list HOWEVER because the variable "score" changes every time the for loop runs and every time the user does the quiz..i find it very difficult to append each score in the same list one after another.
I have read some other response to a similar question and the answer was the use of indexes, but i am not quiet sure how i could use them for my problem as i don't have a specific location in the list to add my 3 different scores, i need to add them one after another.
Here is the part in my code that i need to work on:
hscore = []
hscore.append(score)
print("This is hscore: ",hscore)
score = 0
I am sorry, this is my first time using this webiste so..i don't know how to present my code properly. But as you can see..i have my empty list which i want to append to. score is the variable that changes 3 times, and the print was just for me to check if it was working which it wasn't. Also every time the for loops runs again i had to set the score to 0, so the scores wouldn't get add up together.

You should declare all variables out side your loop, cause it looks like you're resetting score to 0.
And as a recommendation, try using a dictionary to better handle this kind of information.
Like this:
scores={}
scores[Name]=[]
## Your code block here
## or for loop
scores[Name].append(score)
print scores[Name]
scores will be able to hold the scores of each student with a list of their score. Hope that helps! :)