I have a program that writes a list to a file.
The list is a list of pipe delimited lines and the lines should be written to the file like this:
123|GSV|Weather_Mean|hello|joe|43.45
122|GEV|temp_Mean|hello|joe|23.45
124|GSI|Weather_Mean|hello|Mike|47.45
BUT it wrote them line this ahhhh:
123|GSV|Weather_Mean|hello|joe|43.45122|GEV|temp_Mean|hello|joe|23.45124|GSI|Weather_Mean|hello|Mike|47.45
This program wrote all the lines into like one line without any line breaks.. This hurts me a lot and I gotta figure-out how to reverse this but anyway, where is my program wrong here? I thought write lines should write lines down the file rather than just write everything to one line..
fr = open(sys.argv[1], 'r') # source file
fw = open(sys.argv[2]+"/masked_"+sys.argv[1], 'w') # Target Directory Location
for line in fr:
line = line.strip()
if line == "":
continue
columns = line.strip().split('|')
if columns[0].find("#") > 1:
looking_for = columns[0] # this is what we need to search
else:
looking_for = "Dummy#dummy.com"
if looking_for in d:
# by default, iterating over a dictionary will return keys
new_line = d[looking_for]+'|'+'|'.join(columns[1:])
line_list.append(new_line)
else:
new_idx = str(len(d)+1)
d[looking_for] = new_idx
kv = open(sys.argv[3], 'a')
kv.write(looking_for+" "+new_idx+'\n')
kv.close()
new_line = d[looking_for]+'|'+'|'.join(columns[1:])
line_list.append(new_line)
fw.writelines(line_list)
This is actually a pretty common problem for newcomers to Python—especially since, across the standard library and popular third-party libraries, some reading functions strip out newlines, but almost no writing functions (except the log-related stuff) add them.
So, there's a lot of Python code out there that does things like:
fw.write('\n'.join(line_list) + '\n')
(writing a single string) or
fw.writelines(line + '\n' for line in line_list)
Either one is correct, and of course you could even write your own writelinesWithNewlines function that wraps it up…
But you should only do this if you can't avoid it.
It's better if you can create/keep the newlines in the first place—as in Greg Hewgill's suggestions:
line_list.append(new_line + "\n")
And it's even better if you can work at a higher level than raw lines of text, e.g., by using the csv module in the standard library, as esuaro suggests.
For example, right after defining fw, you might do this:
cw = csv.writer(fw, delimiter='|')
Then, instead of this:
new_line = d[looking_for]+'|'+'|'.join(columns[1:])
line_list.append(new_line)
You do this:
row_list.append(d[looking_for] + columns[1:])
And at the end, instead of this:
fw.writelines(line_list)
You do this:
cw.writerows(row_list)
Finally, your design is "open a file, then build up a list of lines to add to the file, then write them all at once". If you're going to open the file up top, why not just write the lines one by one? Whether you're using simple writes or a csv.writer, it'll make your life simpler, and your code easier to read. (Sometimes there can be simplicity, efficiency, or correctness reasons to write a file all at once—but once you've moved the open all the way to the opposite end of the program from the write, you've pretty much lost any benefits of all-at-once.)
The documentation for writelines() states:
writelines() does not add line separators
So you'll need to add them yourself. For example:
line_list.append(new_line + "\n")
whenever you append a new item to line_list.
As others have noted, writelines is a misnomer (it ridiculously does not add newlines to the end of each line).
To do that, explicitly add it to each line:
with open(dst_filename, 'w') as f:
f.writelines(s + '\n' for s in lines)
writelines() does not add line separators. You can alter the list of strings by using map() to add a new \n (line break) at the end of each string.
items = ['abc', '123', '!##']
items = map(lambda x: x + '\n', items)
w.writelines(items)
As others have mentioned, and counter to what the method name would imply, writelines does not add line separators. This is a textbook case for a generator. Here is a contrived example:
def item_generator(things):
for item in things:
yield item
yield '\n'
def write_things_to_file(things):
with open('path_to_file.txt', 'wb') as f:
f.writelines(item_generator(things))
Benefits: adds newlines explicitly without modifying the input or output values or doing any messy string concatenation. And, critically, does not create any new data structures in memory. IO (writing to a file) is when that kind of thing tends to actually matter. Hope this helps someone!
Credits to Brent Faust.
Python >= 3.6 with format string:
with open(dst_filename, 'w') as f:
f.writelines(f'{s}\n' for s in lines)
lines can be a set.
If you are oldschool (like me) you may add f.write('\n') below the second line.
As we have well established here, writelines does not append the newlines for you. But, what everyone seems to be missing, is that it doesn't have to when used as a direct "counterpart" for readlines() and the initial read persevered the newlines!
When you open a file for reading in binary mode (via 'rb'), then use readlines() to fetch the file contents into memory, split by line, the newlines remain attached to the end of your lines! So, if you then subsequently write them back, you don't likely want writelines to append anything!
So if, you do something like:
with open('test.txt','rb') as f: lines=f.readlines()
with open('test.txt','wb') as f: f.writelines(lines)
You should end up with the same file content you started with.
As we want to only separate lines, and the writelines function in python does not support adding separator between lines, I have written the simple code below which best suits this problem:
sep = "\n" # defining the separator
new_lines = sep.join(lines) # lines as an iterator containing line strings
and finally:
with open("file_name", 'w') as file:
file.writelines(new_lines)
and you are done.
Related
This public gist creates a simple scenario where you can turn a text file into a python list line by line.
with open('test.txt', 'r') as listFile:
lines = listFile.read().split("\n")
out = []
for item in lines:
if '"' in item:
out.append('("""' + item + '"""),')
else:
out.append('("' + item + '"),')
with open('out.py', 'a') as outFile:
outFile.write("out = [\n")
for item in out:
outFile.write("\t" + item + "\n")
outFile.write("]")
In text.txt the sixth and seventh lines
'"""'
""
are the ones that produce invalid output. Perhaps you can think of some other examples that would fail to work.
EDIT:
Valid output would look something like this:
out = [
"line1",
"line2",
""" line 3 has """ and "" and " in it """, # but it is a valid string
"last line",
]
The ( and ) characters were an oversight by me they are not needed or wanted...
EDIT: Oh god I'm getting overwhelmed. I'm going to take 5 minutes and post the question again in a better form.
Using a newline character besides \n would also cause the program to fail. In Windows its common to use \r or \r\n.
#abarnert's comment shows a better way to read lines.
A text file is already an iterable of lines.
As with any other iterable, you can convert it to a list by just passing it to the list constructor:
with open('text.txt') as f:
lines = list(f)
Or, if you don't want the newlines on the end of each line:
with open('text.txt') as f:
lines = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in f]
If you want to handle classic Mac and Windows line endings as well as Unix, open the file in universal-newlines mode:
with open('text.txt', 'rU') as f:
… or use the Python 3-style io classes (but note that this will give you unicode strings, not byte strings, which will repr with u prefixes—they're still valid Python literals that way, but they won't look as pretty):
import io
with io.open('text.txt') as f:
Now, it's hard to tell from code that doesn't work and no explanation of what's wrong with it, but it looks like you're trying to figure out how to write that list out as a Python-source-format list display, wrapping it in brackets, adding quotes, escaping any internal quotes, etc. But there's a much easier way to do that too:
with open('out.py', 'a') as f:
f.write(repr(lines))
If you're trying to pretty-print it, there's a pprint module in the stdlib for exactly that purpose, and various bigger/better alternatives on PyPI. Here's an example of the output of pprint.pprint(lines, width=60) with (what I think is) the same input you used for your desired output:
['line1',
'line2',
' line 3 has """ and "" and " in it ',
'last line']
Not exactly the same as your desired output—but, unlike your output, it's a valid Python list display that evaluates to the original input, and it looks pretty readable to me.
Hello i am attempting to adjust a CSV file using Python but my out put is a little off and I can't figure out why.
in_file = open(out, "rb")
fout = "DomainWatchlist.csv"
fin_out_file = open(fout, "wb")
csv_writer2 = csv.writer(fin_out_file, quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
for item in in_file:
if "[.]" in item:
csv_writer2.writerow([item.replace("[.]", ".")])
elif "[dot]" in item:
csv_writer2.writerow([item.replace("[dot]", ".")])
else:
csv_writer2.writerow([item])
in_file.close
fin_out_file.close
The input file contains data that looks like this:
bluecreatureoftheseas.com
12rafvwe[dot]co[dot]cc
12rafvwe[dot]co[dot]cc
404page[dot]co[dot]cc
abalamahala[dot]co[dot]cc
abtarataha[dot]co[dot]cc
adoraath[dot]cz[dot]cc
adoranaya[dot]cz[dot]cc
afnffnjq[dot]co[dot]cc
aftermorningstar[dot]co[dot]cc
I am attempting to fix this data but it comes out looking like this:
"12rafvwe.co.cc
"
"12rafvwe.co.cc
"
"404page.co.cc
"
"abalamahala.co.cc
"
"abtarataha.co.cc
"
"adoraath.cz.cc
"
"adoranaya.cz.cc
"
"afnffnjq.co.cc
"
"aftermorningstar.co.cc
"
"aftrafsudalitf.co.cc
"
"agamafym.cz.cc
"
"agamakus.vv.cc
Why does this create the extra quotes and then add a carriage return?
The reason you're getting a newline is that for item in in_file: iterates over each line in in_file, without stripping the newline. You don't strip the newline anywhere. So it's still there in the single string in the list you pass to writerow.
The reason you're getting quotes is that in CSV, strings with special characters—like newlines—have to be either escaped or quoted. There are different "dialect options" you can set to control that, but by default, it tries to use quoting instead of escaping.
So, the solution is something like this:
for item in in_file:
item = item.rstrip()
# rest of your code
There are some other problems with your code, as well as some ways you're making things more complicated than they need to be.
First, in_file.close does not close the file. You're not calling the function, just referring to it as a function object. You need parentheses to call a function in Python.
But an even simpler way to handle closing files is to use a with statement.
You only have a single column, so there is no need to use the csv module at all. Just fin_out_file.write would work just fine.
You also probably don't want to use binary mode here. If you have a good reason for doing so, that's fine, but if you don't know why you're using it, don't use it.
You don't need to check whether a substring exists before replace-ing it. If you call 'abc'.replace('n', 'N'), it will just harmlessly return 'abc'. All you're doing is writing twice as much code, and making Python search each string twice in a row.
Putting this all together, here's the whole thing in three lines:
with open(out) as in_file, open(fout, 'w') as out_file:
for line in in_file:
out_file.write(line.replace("[.]", ".").replace("[dot]", "."))
a bit OT but perl was built for this
$ perl -i -ple 's/\[dot\]/./g' filename
will do the job, including saving the new file on the oldfilename.
I have looked around StackOverflow and couldn't find an answer to my specific question so forgive me if I have missed something.
import re
target = open('output.txt', 'w')
for line in open('input.txt', 'r'):
match = re.search(r'Stuff', line)
if match:
match_text = match.group()
target.write(match_text + '\n')
else:
continue
target.close()
The file I am parsing is huge so need to process it line by line.
This (of course) leaves an additional newline at the end of the file.
How should I best change this code so that on the final iteration of the 'if match' loop it doesn't put the extra newline character at the end of the file. Should it look through the file again at the end and remove the last line (seems a bit inefficient though)?
The existing StackOverflow questions I have found cover removing all new lines from a file.
If there is a more pythonic / efficient way to write this code I would welcome suggestions for my own learning also.
Thanks for the help!
Another thing you can do, is to truncate the file. .tell() gives us the current byte number in the file. We then subtract one, and truncate it there to remove the trailing newline.
with open('a.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write('abc\n')
f.write('def\n')
f.truncate(f.tell()-1)
On Linux and MacOS, the -1 is correct, but on Windows it needs to be -2. A more Pythonic method of determining which is to check os.linesep.
import os
remove_chars = len(os.linesep)
with open('a.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write('abc\n')
f.write('def\n')
f.truncate(f.tell() - remove_chars)
kindal's answer is also valid, with the exception that you said it's a large file. This method will let you handle a terabyte sized file on a gigabyte of RAM.
Write the newline of each line at the beginning of the next line. To avoid writing a newline at the beginning of the first line, use a variable that is initialized to an empty string and then set to a newline in the loop.
import re
with open('input.txt') as source, open('output.txt', 'w') as target:
newline = ''
for line in source:
match = re.search(r'Stuff', line)
if match:
target.write(newline + match.group())
newline = '\n'
I also restructured your code a bit (the else: continue is not needed, because what else is the loop going to do?) and changed it to use the with statement so the files are automatically closed.
The shortest path from what you have to what you want is probably to store the results in a list, then join the list with newlines and write that to the file.
import re
target = open('output.txt', 'w')
results = []
for line in open('input.txt', 'r'):
match = re.search(r'Stuff', line)
if match:
results.append(match.group())
target.write("\n".join(results))
target.close()
Voilà, no extra newline at the beginning or end. Might not scale very well of the resulting list is huge. (And like kindall I left out the else)
Since you're performing the same regex over and over, you'd probably want to compile it beforehand.
import re
prog = re.compile(r'Stuff')
I tend to input from and output to stdin and stdout for simplicity. But that's a matter of taste (and specs).
from sys import stdin, stdout
Ignoring the specific requirement about removing the final EOL[1], and just addressing the bit about your own learning, the whole thing could be written like this:
from itertools import imap
stdout.writelines(match.group() for match in imap(prog.match, stdin) if match)
[1] As others have commented, this is a Bad Thing, and it's extremely annoying when someone does this.
So I have a program which runs. This is part of the code:
FileName = 'Numberdata.dat'
NumberFile = open(FileName, 'r')
for Line in NumberFile:
if Line == '4':
print('1')
else:
print('9')
NumberFile.close()
A pretty pointless thing to do, yes, but I'm just doing it to enhance my understanding. However, this code doesn't work. The file remains as it is and the 4's are not replaced by 1's and everything else isn't replaced by 9's, they merely stay the same. Where am I going wrong?
Numberdata.dat is "444666444666444888111000444"
It is now:
FileName = 'Binarydata.dat'
BinaryFile = open(FileName, 'w')
for character in BinaryFile:
if charcter == '0':
NumberFile.write('')
else:
NumberFile.write('#')
BinaryFile.close()
You need to build up a string and write it to the file.
FileName = 'Numberdata.dat'
NumberFileHandle = open(FileName, 'r')
newFileString = ""
for Line in NumberFileHandle:
for char in line: # this will work for any number of lines.
if char == '4':
newFileString += "1"
elif char == '\n':
newFileString += char
else:
newFileString += "9"
NumberFileHandle.close()
NumberFileHandle = open(FileName, 'w')
NumberFileHandle.write(newFileString)
NumberFileHandle.close()
First, Line will never equal 4 because each line read from the file includes the newline character at the end. Try if Line.strip() == '4'. This will remove all white space from the beginning and end of the line.
Edit: I just saw your edit... naturally, if you have all your numbers on one line, the line will never equal 4. You probably want to read the file a character at a time, not a line at a time.
Second, you're not writing to any file, so naturally the file won't be getting changed. You will run into difficulty changing a file as you read it (since you have to figure out how to back up to the same place you just read from), so the usual practice is to read from one file and write to a different one.
Because you need to write to the file as well.
with open(FileName, 'w') as f:
f.write(...)
Right now you are just reading and manipulating the data, but you're not writing them back.
At the end you'll need to reopen your file in write mode and write to it.
If you're looking for references, take a look at theopen() documentation and at the Reading and Writing Files section of the Python Tutorial.
Edit: You shouldn't read and write at the same time from the same file. You could either, write to a temp file and at the end call shutil.move(), or load and manipulate your data and then re-open your original file in write mode and write them back.
You are not sending any output to the data, you are simply printing 1 and 9 to stdout which is usually the terminal or interpreter.
If you want to write to the file you have to use open again with w.
eg.
out = open(FileName, 'w')
you can also use
print >>out, '1'
Then you can call out.write('1') for example.
Also it is a better idea to read the file first if you want to overwrite and write after.
According to your comment:
Numberdata is just a load of numbers all one line. Maybe that's where I'm going wrong? It is "444666444666444888111000444"
I can tell you that the for cycle, iterate over lines and not over chars. There is a logic error.
Moreover, you have to write the file, as Rik Poggi said (just rember to open it in write mode)
A few things:
The r flag to open indicates read-only mode. This obviously won't let you write to the file.
print() outputs things to the screen. What you really want to do is output to the file. Have you read the Python File I/O tutorial?
for line in file_handle: loops through files one line at a time. Thus, if line == '4' will only be true if the line consists of a single character, 4, all on its own.
If you want to loop over characters in a string, then do something like for character in line:.
Modifying bits of a file "in place" is a bit harder than you think.
This is because if you insert data into the middle of a file, the rest of the data has to shuffle over to make room - this is really slow because everything after your insertion has to be rewritten.
In theory, a one-byte for one-byte replacement can be done fast, but in general people don't want to replace byte-for-byte, so this is an advanced feature. (See seek().) The usual approach is to just write out a whole new file.
Because print doesn't write to your file.
You have to open the file and read it, modify the string you obtain creating a new string, open again the file and write it again.
FileName = 'Numberdata.dat'
NumberFile = open(FileName, 'r')
data = NumberFile.read()
NumberFile.close()
dl = data.split('\n')
for i in range(len(dl)):
if dl[i] =='4':
dl[i] = '1'
else:
dl[i] = '9'
NumberFile = open(FileName, 'w')
NumberFile.write('\n'.join(dl))
NumberFile.close()
Try in this way. There are for sure different methods but this seems to be the most "linear" to me =)
i have some data stored in a .txt file in this format:
----------|||||||||||||||||||||||||-----------|||||||||||
1029450386abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy0293847719184756301943
1020414646canBeFollowedBySpaces 3292532113435532419963
don't ask...
i have many lines of this, and i need a way to add more digits to the end of a particular line.
i've written code to find the line i want, but im stumped as to how to add 11 characters to the end of it. i've looked around, this site has been helpful with some other issues i've run into, but i can't seem to find what i need for this.
it is important that the line retain its position in the file, and its contents in their current order.
using python3.1, how would you turn this:
1020414646canBeFollowedBySpaces 3292532113435532419963
into
1020414646canBeFollowedBySpaces 329253211343553241996301846372998
As a general principle, there's no shortcut to "inserting" new data in the middle of a text file. You will need to make a copy of the entire original file in a new file, modifying your desired line(s) of text on the way.
For example:
with open("input.txt") as infile:
with open("output.txt", "w") as outfile:
for s in infile:
s = s.rstrip() # remove trailing newline
if "target" in s:
s += "0123456789"
print(s, file=outfile)
os.rename("input.txt", "input.txt.original")
os.rename("output.txt", "input.txt")
Check out the fileinput module, it can do sort of "inplace" edits with files. though I believe temporary files are still involved in the internal process.
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input('input.txt', inplace=1, backup='.orig'):
if line.startswith('1020414646canBeFollowedBySpaces'):
line = line.rstrip() + '01846372998' '\n'
print(line, end='')
The print now prints to the file instead of the console.
You might want to back up your original file before editing.
target_chain = '1020414646canBeFollowedBySpaces 3292532113435532419963'
to_add = '01846372998'
with open('zaza.txt','rb+') as f:
ch = f.read()
x = ch.find(target_chain)
f.seek(x + len(target_chain),0)
f.write(to_add)
f.write(ch[x + len(target_chain):])
In this method it's absolutely obligatory to open the file in binary mode 'b' for some reason linked to the treatment of the end of lines by Python (see Universal Newline, enabled by default)
The mode 'r+' is to allow the writing as well as the reading
In this method, what is before the target_chain in the file remains untouched. And what is after the target_chain is shifted ahead. As said by Greg Hewgill, there is no possibility to move apart bits on a hard drisk to insert new bits in the middle.
Evidently, if the file is very big, reading all of its content in ch could be too much memory consuming and the algorithm should then be changed: reading line after line until the line containing the target_chain, and then reading the next line before inserting, and then continuing to do "reading the next line - re-writing on the current line" until the end of the file in order to shift progressively the content from the line concerned with addition.
You see what I mean...
Copy the file, line by line, to another file. When you get to the line that needs extra chars then add them before writing.