parsing tab-delimited text file into arrays

[cahram]

Hi, I'm new to Python and have a task of reading a user input text file that is tab-delimited and contains 4 columns in each line: Authors, Year, Title and Journal.

I currently am just able to open a file, and now I don't know how to begin parsing the data.

The recommended way of sorting the data is to use the following three lists (which I set as):

authorsList = []
journalsList = []
papersList = []

In the papersList, each paper's entry is its title, year published, the index of each author(s) and the index of the journal; in this way the name of each journal and author is only stored in one place.

What I learned to do in Python: basic I/O, loops and conditions, defining functions and little exception handling. I've been going through google but a lot of answers to the same question I have, have been using the csv module and regular expressions, which I tried to learn myself but couldn't understand the code that was suggested. Is there a way to do it without the csv and re module?

I was thinking of doing something like this:

for line in openfile:
   a, b, c, d = line.split("\t")
   authorsList.append(a)
   papersList.append(b, c)
   journalsList.append(d)

but dont think that is right at all.
Any suggestions or tips?
Thanks for your time and consideration.

[erbrose]

this is what i've been doing... im pretty new to python too though...

TmpArr = []

for line in openfile:
    #strips line
    line = line.strip()
    TmpArr.append(line.split('\t'))

now you have a multidimensiona l list (TmpArr)... you can sort by columns by doing something like this

TmpArr.sort(key=lambda a:(a[0]))

if say you wanted to sort by authorlist

[Glenton]

We'll assume that the authors are in a nice consistent format.

Then something like the following (untested) code should work.

authorsList = []
journalsList = []
papersList = []
for line in openfile:
    authors, yea, tit, jou = line.split("\t")
    authInd=[]  #This is the index we will add to the papers list.
    #suppose authors is a list of authors.  
    #Then we need to go through each one
    for a in authors:
        #first check if it's in authorsList
        if a not in authorsList:
            #if a is not in authorsList, then add it
            authorsList.append(a)
        #add the index to the authInd
        authInd.append(authorsList.index(a))
    papersList.append(authInd)

Etc. Since you need similar stuff for the journal, you might want to write a function that does the necessary work, and then pass both the author and journal stuff to the function.

Good luck.