What do I need to change about my program?

[bugaboo]

I'm trying to write a program that will determine the total number of lines, columns, digits, as well as the maximum and minimum number. However it returns the wrong data and can't count any negative numbers. My program is...

max = 0
min = 0

def getMaxMin(digitsList):
	global max
	max = digitsList[0]
	global min
	min  = digitsList[0]

	for digit in digitsList:
		if digit > max:
			max = digit
		if digit < min:
			min = digit

import sys

def main():

	filename = sys.argv[1]
	file = open(filename,"r")
	line = file.readline()

	lines = 0
	columns = 0
	digits = 0
	digitsList = []

	while line != "":
		line = line.strip('\n')
		lines += 1
		words = line.split('\t')

		for word in words:
			if word.isdigit():
				digits += 1
				digitsList.append(int(word))

		columns = len(words)
		line = file.readline()

	getMaxMin(digitsList)
	print "lines = ",lines
	print "columns = ",columns	
	print "digits = ",digits 
	print "max = ",max
	print "min = ",min

main()

And the files that I'm trying to use are

Month Minimum Maximum Average
Jan -16 -7 -11.5
Feb -15 -5 -10
Mar -8 1 -4
Apr 0 11 6
May 7 19 13
Jun 12 24 18
Jul 14 27 21
Aug 14 26 20
Sep 9 20 15
Oct 3 14 9
Nov -2 5 2
Dec -12 -4 -8



and

Country Gold Silver Bronze Total
US 9 15 13 37
GE 10 13 7 30
CA 14 7 5 26
NO 9 8 6 23
AU 4 6 6 16
RF 3 5 7 15
KO 6 6 2 14
CH 5 2 4 11
SW 5 2 4 11
FR 2 3 6 11


Anyone who can help me out??

[bvdet]

The example code attempts to type cast each element to int which makes it easy to determine the max and min. It also uses str method split() like yours, but assumes a whitespace delimiter.

def conv_int(s):
    try:
        s = int(s)
    except: pass
    return s

fn = "text6.txt"
f = open(fn)
labels = f.readline().strip().split()
lineList = []
for line in f:
    lineList.append([conv_int(s.strip()) for s in line.strip().split()])

num_cols = len(labels)
max_max = max([item[2] for item in lineList])
min_min = min([item[1] for item in lineList])
print num_cols
print max_max
print min_min