[portland] Reformatting Data Files

[Rich Shepard]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2011, Ethan Furman wrote:

> How about a function that either floats your string, or returns the string if 
> it's not a number?

Ethan,

   Thank you. I'm moving among emacs, SQL, R, and python and think my brain
short-circuited along the way. Didn't think of this.

> Something like this:
>
> --> def flt_or_str(unk):
> ...     try:
> ...         return float(unk)
> ...     except ValueError:
> ...         return unk
> ...
> --> float("1")
> 1.0
> --> float("hello")
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> ValueError: invalid literal for float(): hello
> --> flt_or_str("1")
> 1.0
> --> flt_or_str("829mg/L")
> '829mg/L'
>
>
> Then your line of codes becomes:
>
>  outdata.writerow([location, sampdate[i], row[0], flt_or_str(row[i])])
>
> Hope this helps!

   Certainly does.

Much appreciated,

Rich