Python Data Utils

**Gabriel Genellina** · Apr 6 '08, 07:15 AM

Re: Python Data Utils

En Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:43:29 -0300, Jesse Aldridge
<JesseAldridge@ gmail.comescrib ió:

In an effort to experiment with open source, I put a couple of my
utility files up <a href="http://github.com/jessald/python_data_uti ls/
tree/master">here</a>. What do you think?

Some names are a bit obscure - "universify "?
Docstrings would help too, and blank lines, and in general following PEP8
style guide.
find_string is a much slower version of the find method of string objects,
same for find_string_las t, contains and others.
And I don't see what you gain from things like:
def count( s, sub ):
return s.count( sub )
it's slower and harder to read (because one has to *know* what S.count
does).
Other functions may be useful but without even a docstring it's hard to
tell what they do.
delete_string, as a function, looks like it should delete some string, not
return a character; I'd use a string constant DELETE_CHAR, or just DEL,
it's name in ASCII.

In general, None should be compared using `is` instead of `==`, and
instead of `type(x) is type(0)` or `type(x) == type(0)` I'd use
`isinstance(x, int)` (unless you use Python 2.1 or older, int, float, str,
list... are types themselves)

Files.py is similar - a lot of more or less common things with a different
name, and a few wheels reinvented :)

Don't feel bad, but I would not use those modules because there is no net
gain, and even a loss in legibility. If you develop your code alone,
that's fine, you know what you wrote and can use it whenever you please.
But for others to use it, it means that they have to learn new ways to say
the same old thing.

--
Gabriel Genellina

**Konstantin Veretennicov** · Apr 6 '08, 11:15 AM

Re: Python Data Utils

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Jesse Aldridge <JesseAldridge@ gmail.comwrote:

In an effort to experiment with open source, I put a couple of my
utility files up <a href="http://github.com/jessald/python_data_uti ls/
tree/master">here</a>. What do you think?

Would you search for, install, learn and use these modules if *someone
else* created them?

--
kv

**Jesse Aldridge** · Apr 6 '08, 02:36 PM

Re: Python Data Utils

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I made a lot of modifications based
on your advice. Mind taking another look?

Some names are a bit obscure - "universify "?
Docstrings would help too, and blank lines

I changed the name of universify and added a docstrings to every
function.

...PEP8

I made a few changes in this direction, feel free to take it the rest
of the way ;)

find_string is a much slower version of the find method of string objects,

Got rid of find_string, and contains. What are the others?

And I don't see what you gain from things like:
def count( s, sub ):
return s.count( sub )

Yeah, got rid of that stuff too. I ported these files from Java a
while ago, so there was a bit of junk like this lying around.

delete_string, as a function, looks like it should delete some string, not
return a character; I'd use a string constant DELETE_CHAR, or just DEL,
it's name in ASCII.

Got rid of that too :)

In general, None should be compared using `is` instead of `==`, and
instead of `type(x) is type(0)` or `type(x) == type(0)` I'd use
`isinstance(x, int)` (unless you use Python 2.1 or older, int, float, str,
list... are types themselves)

Changed.

So, yeah, hopefully things are better now.

Soon developers will flock from all over the world to build this into
the greatest data manipulation library the world has ever seen! ...or
not...

I'm tired. Making code for other people is too much work :)

**Jesse Aldridge** · Apr 6 '08, 02:36 PM

Re: Python Data Utils

On Apr 6, 6:14 am, "Konstantin Veretennicov" <kveretenni...@ gmail.com>
wrote:

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Jesse Aldridge <JesseAldri...@ gmail.comwrote:

In an effort to experiment with open source, I put a couple of my
utility files up <a href="http://github.com/jessald/python_data_uti ls/
tree/master">here</a>. What do you think?

>
Would you search for, install, learn and use these modules if *someone
else* created them?
>
--
kv

Yes, I would. I searched a bit for a library that offered similar
functionality. I didn't find anything. Maybe I'm just looking in the
wrong place. Any suggestions?

**Jesse Aldridge** · Apr 7 '08, 06:25 AM

Re: Python Data Utils

Docstrings go *after* the def statement.

Fixed.

changing "( " to "(" and " )" to ")".

Changed.

I attempted to take out everything that could be trivially implemented
with the standard library.
This has left me with... 4 functions in S.py. 1 one of them is used
internally, and the others aren't terribly awesome :\ But I think the
ones that remain are at least a bit useful :)

The penny drops :-)

yeah, yeah

Not in all places ... look at the ends_with function. BTW, this should
be named something like "fuzzy_ends_wit h".

fixed

fuzzy_match(Non e, None) should return False.

changed

2. make_fuzzy function: first two statements should read "s =
s.replace(..... )" instead of "s.replace(.... .)".

fixed

3. Fuzzy matching functions are specialised to an application; I can't
imagine that anyone would be particularly interested in those that you
provide.

I think it's useful in many cases. I use it all the time. It helps
guard against annoying input errors.

A basic string normalisation-before-comparison function would
usefully include replacing multiple internal whitespace characters by
a single space.

I added this functionality.

5. Casual inspection of your indentation function gave the impression
that it was stuffed

Fixed

Thanks for the feedback.

**John Machin** · Apr 7 '08, 09:25 AM

Re: Python Data Utils

On Apr 7, 4:22 pm, Jesse Aldridge <JesseAldri...@ gmail.comwrote:

>

changing "( " to "(" and " )" to ")".

>
Changed.

But then you introduced more.

>
I attempted to take out everything that could be trivially implemented
with the standard library.
This has left me with... 4 functions in S.py. 1 one of them is used
internally, and the others aren't terribly awesome :\ But I think the
ones that remain are at least a bit useful :)

If you want to look at stuff that can't be implemented trivially using
str/unicode methods, and is more than a bit useful, google for
mxTextTools.

>

A basic string normalisation-before-comparison function would
usefully include replacing multiple internal whitespace characters by
a single space.

>
I added this functionality.

Not quite. I said "whitespace ", not "space".

The following is the standard Python idiom for removing leading and
trailing whitespace and replacing one or more whitespace characters
with a single space:

def normalise_white space(s):
return ' '.join(s.split( ))

If your data is obtained by web scraping, you may find some people use
'\xA0' aka NBSP to pad out fields. The above code will get rid of
these if s is unicode; if s is str, you need to chuck
a .replace('\xA0' , ' ') in there somewhere.

HTH,
John

Python Data Utils

Python Data Utils

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