[Tutor] One more (sorry)

[Danny Yoo]

On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, kevin parks wrote:

> So if i have a file that looks like this:
> 
> foo  1.0  5.0  10.0
> foo2 1.0  5.0  15.0
> foo  2.5  3.0  9.00
> foo  3.1  5.5  12.00
> foo3 5.0  1.25 7.00
> 
> and i want to add .5 to all of foo's column 2 to get:
> 
> foo  1.5  5.0  10.0
> foo2 1.0  5.0  15.0
> foo  3.0  3.0  9.00
> foo  3.6  5.5  12.00
> foo3 5.0  1.25 7.00
[some text cut]
> 
> How would I do that?
[more text cut]


If we read in the file and somehow process it to get something like:

[ [foo 1.0 5.0 10.0]
  [foo2 1.0  5.0  15.0]
  [foo  2.5  3.0  9.00]
  [foo  3.1  5.5  12.00]
  [foo3 5.0  1.25 7.00] ]

That is, a list of columns, then the problem should become a little
easier.  Here's a function that might do this:

###
def readRowsAndColumns(filename):
    f = open(filename)
    rows = []
    for line in f.readlines():
        columns = line.split()
        rows.append(columns)
    return rows
###

It's not perfect (and also untested.  *grin*), because it does leave the
"numbers" as strings, so we have to be a little careful when we're about
to do something like "add 0.5 to every column in the foo row."

Hope this helps!