[Tutor] An interesting case... of east vs. west

[John]

I was trying to read in a tab delimited file i was given with lat and lon,
the thing is I needed decimal lat, and decimal long... well, anyway I think
you can see what my problem was:

for i in range(0,344)
   y=d[i][2].split('\xb0')
    x=d[i][3].split('\xb0')
    ydeg,ymin=y[0].strip(),y[1].rstrip('\' N').rstrip("\' S")
    xdeg,xmin=x[0].strip(),x[1].rstrip("\' E").rstrip("\' W")
    if re.search('\ZW','x[1]') xmin=-1*xmin
    if re.search('\ZS','y[1]') ymin=-1*ymin
    declat=int(ydeg)+(float(ymin)/60)
    declon=int(xdeg)+(float(xmin)/60)

The thing is, it isn't terribly robust (I'm not even positive it's working
correctly!!). For instance, as you might have guessed I was given Lat and
Lon in the following format:
STNA 45° 49' N 08° 38' E
STNB 46° 58' 19° 33' E
STNC 53°33'  -9°54'
STND 51°32' N 12°54' W

Some indicating north or some, and some not. This wasn't a concern, as I
knew they were all North. However, the West / East issue is another story.
Anyone have a more elegant solution?

-john
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