Re: maximum value in a column of file

Collapse
This topic is closed.
X
X
 
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • Fredrik Lundh

    Re: maximum value in a column of file

    maurizio wrote:
    i tryed to use the module max of numpy,
    the problem is that i don't know how to put the column of the file in an
    array.
    (i'm new in phyton).
    anyway if you think there is a better way.....
    What kind of file is it? Did you pick numpy because you want to do
    matrix operations (beyond just finding a maximum value), or was it just
    the first thing you stumbled upon when researching the problem?

    A simple pattern for finding the maximum value in a file, using only
    plain Python code, is:

    max_value = ... some very small value ...
    for line in file:
    value = ... extract value from line ...
    if value max_value:
    max_value = value

    If it's not obvious what "some very small value" is, given the range of
    data you're working with, you can do

    max_value = None
    for line in file:
    value = ... extract value from line ...
    if max_value is None or value max_value:
    max_value = value

    instead (this leaves max_value set to None if the file is empty)

    A more experienced Python hacker might write

    def get_all_values( file):
    for line in file:
    value = ... extract value from line ...
    yield value

    ...

    max_value = max(get_all_val ues(file))

    instead. But this still leaves us with the problem of extracting the
    value. The best way to do that depends on the kind of files you're
    working with; for fixed-format text files, you could use string slicing
    and int/float for conversion (e.g. "value = float(line[10:20])", see the
    tutorial for details); for other text formats, you could use
    split/partition or regular expressions, or maybe an existing module
    (such as "csv"); for binary formats, there's a large
    number of existing tools.

    And if you really want to use numpy for other reasons than just getting
    a maximum value from a column, there's plenty of stuff in NumPy and
    SciPy (http://www.scipy.org/) that might be useful.

    So, in other words, I guess we still need more info.

    </F>

Working...