[Tutor] a quick Q: how to use for loop to read a series of files with .doc end

[Andreas Perstinger]

On 2011-10-07 14:21, lina wrote:
>>>  I don't know why this gives a key error on 'E' (which basically means that
>>>  there is no key 'E') since the code above should guarantee that it exists.
>>>  Odd. I'm also not sure why the error occurs after it prints summary. Are you
>>>  sure the output is in the sequence you showed in your message?
>>>
>>>   One simple explanation:  it continued on to the next file, which has
>>  neither "E" nor "B" in it.
>>
> In this directory, I only kept one file. try.xpm

That's wrong.

>   $ more try.xpm
> aaEbb
> aEEbb
> EaEbb
> EaEbE
>
> $ ls
> counter-vertically-v2.py  try.xpm
> counter-vertically.py   try.txt

As "ls" proves, you have *4* files in the directory.

You start your script with "dofiles(".")". This function gets a list of 
*all* files in the directory in an *arbitrary* order and processes each 
of it.

In your function "processfile" you first create an empty dictionary 
("results = {}") and then you put values into the dictionary *only* for 
xpm-files ("if ext == INFILEEXT:"). *But* you print the summary for 
*every* file because the indentation at the end of the function is 
outside the if-branch where you check for the file extension. So for 
every file which isn't a xpm-file, "results" is an empty dictionary (see 
first line of the function) and therefore "zip(results['E'], 
results['B'])" will throw an exception.

How to solve it? I personally would check for the file extension in the 
function "dofiles" and would only continue with xpm-files (in other 
words move the if-statement from "processfile" to "dofiles".)

Bye, Andreas