Develop Reference

Is there a way to programmatically add text from one word file to another?

I've tried using python's mailmerge library on MS Word fields, but I lose all the formatting on the text. I'm wondering if there's a way to replicate going in Word and using 'Insert>Object>Text from file' using a python library (or really anything at this point). If there's an easy way to do this by editing the oxml even that would work. I just need some idea of where to start looking, or if I need to program this by hand.

I tried to come up with something to start with, hope it is useful. In the code below, I do open the file or create one if it does not exist, write some lines of data. Read the same lines of data in file1 then write them in a freshly created file2.
#Read and write files using the built-in Python methods
def main():
#open the file for writing and create if it does not exist
file = open("file1.txt", "w+")
#write some lines of data to the file
for i in range(5):
file.write("This is Andela %d\r\n" % (i + 1))
file.close()
#write text in file1.txt to another file called file2
open("file2.txt", "w").writelines([l for l in open("file1.txt").readlines() if "Andela" in l])
main()

How to write lines in a txt file, with data from a csv file

How can I tell Python to open a CSV file, and merge all columns per line, into new lines in a new TXT file?
To explain:
I'm trying to download a bunch of member profiles from a website, for a research project. To do this, I want to write a list of all the URLs in a TXT file.
The URLs are akin to this: website.com-name-country-title-id.html
I have written a script that takes all these bits of information for each member and saves them in columns (name/country/title/id), in a CSV file, like this:
mark japan rookie married
john sweden expert single
suzy germany rookie married
etc...
Now I want to open this CSV and write a TXT file with lines like these:
www.website.com/mark-japan-rookie-married.html
www.website.com/john-sweden-expert-single.html
www.website.com/suzy-germany-rookie-married.html
etc...
Here's the code I have so far. As you can probably tell I barely know what I'm doing so help will be greatly appreciated!!!
import csv
x = "http://website.com/"
y = ".html"
csvFile=csv.DictReader(open("NameCountryTitleId.csv")) #This file is stored on my computer
file = open("urls.txt", "wb")
for row in csvFile:
strArgument=str(row['name'])+"-"+str(row['country'])+"-"+str(row['title'])+"-"+str(row['id'])
try:
file.write(x + strArgument + y)
except:
print(strArgument)
file.close()
I don't get any error messages after running this, but the TXT file is completely empty.

Rather than using a DictReader, use a regular reader to make it easier to join the row:
import csv
url_format = "http://website.com/{}.html"
csv_file = 'NameCountryTitleId.csv'
urls_file = 'urls.txt'
with open(csv_file, 'rb') as infh, open(urls_file, 'w') as outfh:
reader = csv.reader(infh)
for row in reader:
url = url_format.format('-'.join(row))
outfh.write(url + '\n')
The with statement ensures the files are closed properly again when the code completes.
Further changes I made:
In Python 2, open a CSV files in binary mode, the csv module handles line endings itself, because correctly quoted column data can have embedded newlines in them.
Regular text files should be opened in text mode still though.
When writing lines to a file, do remember to add a newline character to delineate lines.
Using a string format (str.format()) is far more flexible than using string concatenations.
str.join() lets you join a sequence of strings together with a separator.

its actually quite simple, you are working with strings yet the file you are opening to write to is being opened in bytes mode, so every single time the write fails and it prints to the screen instead. try changing this line:
file = open("urls.txt", "wb")
to this:
file = open("urls.txt", "w")
EDIT:
i stand corrected, however i would like to point out that with an absence of newlines or some other form of separator, how do you intend to use the URLs later on? if you put newlines between each URL they would be easy to recover

Write strings to another file

The Problem - Update:
I could get the script to print out but had a hard time trying to figure out a way to put the stdout into a file instead of on a screen. the below script worked on printing results to the screen. I posted the solution right after this code, scroll to the [ solution ] at the bottom.
First post:
I'm using Python 2.7.3. I am trying to extract the last words of a text file after the colon (:) and write them into another txt file. So far I am able to print the results on the screen and it works perfectly, but when I try to write the results to a new file it gives me str has no attribute write/writeline. Here it the code snippet:
# the txt file I'm trying to extract last words from and write strings into a file
#Hello:there:buddy
#How:areyou:doing
#I:amFine:thanks
#thats:good:I:guess
x = raw_input("Enter the full path + file name + file extension you wish to use: ")
def ripple(x):
with open(x) as file:
for line in file:
for word in line.split():
if ':' in word:
try:
print word.split(':')[-1]
except (IndexError):
pass
ripple(x)
The code above works perfectly when printing to the screen. However I have spent hours reading Python's documentation and can't seem to find a way to have the results written to a file. I know how to open a file and write to it with writeline, readline, etc, but it doesn't seem to work with strings.
Any suggestions on how to achieve this?
PS: I didn't add the code that caused the write error, because I figured this would be easier to look at.
End of First Post
The Solution - Update:
Managed to get python to extract and save it into another file with the code below.
The Code:
inputFile = open ('c:/folder/Thefile.txt', 'r')
outputFile = open ('c:/folder/ExtractedFile.txt', 'w')
tempStore = outputFile
for line in inputFile:
for word in line.split():
if ':' in word:
splitting = word.split(':')[-1]
tempStore.writelines(splitting +'\n')
print splitting
inputFile.close()
outputFile.close()
Update:
checkout droogans code over mine, it was more efficient.

Try this:
with open('workfile', 'w') as f:
f.write(word.split(':')[-1] + '\n')
If you really want to use the print method, you can:
from __future__ import print_function
print("hi there", file=f)
according to Correct way to write line to file in Python. You should add the __future__ import if you are using python 2, if you are using python 3 it's already there.

I think your question is good, and when you're done, you should head over to code review and get your code looked at for other things I've noticed:
# the txt file I'm trying to extract last words from and write strings into a file
#Hello:there:buddy
#How:areyou:doing
#I:amFine:thanks
#thats:good:I:guess
First off, thanks for putting example file contents at the top of your question.
x = raw_input("Enter the full path + file name + file extension you wish to use: ")
I don't think this part is neccessary. You can just create a better parameter for ripple than x. I think file_loc is a pretty standard one.
def ripple(x):
with open(x) as file:
With open, you are able to mark the operation happening to the file. I also like to name my file object according to its job. In other words, with open(file_loc, 'r') as r: reminds me that r.foo is going to be my file that is being read from.
for line in file:
for word in line.split():
if ':' in word:
First off, your for word in line.split() statement does nothing but put the "Hello:there:buddy" string into a list: ["Hello:there:buddy"]. A better idea would be to pass split an argument, which does more or less what you're trying to do here. For example, "Hello:there:buddy".split(":") would output ['Hello', 'there', 'buddy'], making your search for colons an accomplished task.
try:
print word.split(':')[-1]
except (IndexError):
pass
Another advantage is that you won't need to check for an IndexError, since you'll have, at least, an empty string, which when split, comes back as an empty string. In other words, it'll write nothing for that line.
ripple(x)
For ripple(x), you would instead call ripple('/home/user/sometext.txt').
So, try looking over this, and explore code review. There's a guy named Winston who does really awesome work with Python and self-described newbies. I always pick up new tricks from that guy.
Here is my take on it, re-written out:
import os #for renaming the output file
def ripple(file_loc='/typical/location/while/developing.txt'):
outfile = "output.".join(os.path.basename(file_loc).split('.'))
with open(outfile, 'w') as w:
lines = open(file_loc, 'r').readlines() #everything is one giant list
w.write('\n'.join([line.split(':')[-1] for line in lines]))
ripple()
Try breaking this down, line by line, and changing things around. It's pretty condensed, but once you pick up comprehensions and using lists, it'll be more natural to read code this way.

You are trying to call .write() on a string object.
You either got your arguments mixed up (you'll need to call fileobject.write(yourdata), not yourdata.write(fileobject)) or you accidentally re-used the same variable for both your open destination file object and storing a string.

Why can't I read file after my for loops python using ubuntu

For some reason after my for loops I am not able to read the ouput text file.
For example :
for line in a:
name = (x)
f = open('name','w')
for line in b:
get = (something)
f.write(get)
for line in c:
get2 = (something2)
f.write(get2)
(the below works if the above is commented out only)
f1 = open(name, 'r')
for line in f1:
print line
If I comment out the loops, I am able to read the file and print the contents.
I am very new to coding and guessing this is something obvious that I am missing.However I can't seem to figure it out. I have used google but the more I read the more I feel I am missing something. Any advice is appreciated.

#bernie is right in his comment above. The problem is that when you do open(..., 'w'), the file is rewritten to be blank, but Python/the OS doesn't actually write out the things you write to disk until its buffer is filled up or you call close(). (This delay helps speed things up, because writing to disk is slow.) You can also call flush() to force this without closing the file.
The with statement bernie referred to would look like this:
with open('name', 'w') as f:
for line in b:
b.write(...)
for line in c:
b.write(...)
# f is closed now that we're leaving the with block
# and any writes are actually written out to the file
with open('name', 'r') as f:
for line in f:
print line
If you're using Python 2.5 rather than 2.6 or 2.7, you'll have to do from __future__ import with_statement at the top of your file.

How to change the field separator of a file using Python?

I'm new to Python from the R world, and I'm working on big text files, structured in data columns (this is LiDaR data, so generally 60 million + records).
Is it possible to change the field separator (eg from tab-delimited to comma-delimited) of such a big file without having to read the file and do a for loop on the lines?

No.
Read the file in
Change separators for each line
Write each line back
This is easily doable with just a few lines of Python (not tested but the general approach works):
# Python - it's so readable, the code basically just writes itself ;-)
#
with open('infile') as infile:
with open('outfile', 'w') as outfile:
for line in infile:
fields = line.split('\t')
outfile.write(','.join(fields))
I'm not familiar with R, but if it has a library function for this it's probably doing exactly the same thing.
Note that this code only reads one line at a time from the file, so the file can be larger than the physical RAM - it's never wholly loaded in.

You can use the linux tr command to replace any character with any other character.

Actually lets say yes, you can do it without loops eg:
with open('in') as infile:
with open('out', 'w') as outfile:
map(lambda line: outfile.write(','.join(line.split('\n'))), infile)

You cant, but i strongly advise you to check generators.
Point is that you can make faster and well structured program without need to write and store data in memory in order to process it.
For instance
file = open("bigfile","w")
j = (i.split("\t") for i in file)
s = (","join(i) for i in j)
#and now magic happens
for i in s:
some_other_file.write(i)
This code spends memory for holding only single line.