[Tutor] How best to structure a plain text data file for use in program(s) and later updating with new data?

[Martin A. Brown]

Good afternoon,

>> If its not too big a task you could even convert the data
>> structure to JSON which is quite a close match to what you
>> have now and the json module will help you read/write
>> to them.

I would agree with the JSON recommendation (until your data set 
grows to more than 10GB in size).  Also, if you are operating with 
JSON, you can add elements and delete elements and the serialization 
bits don't care.  This makes it more dynamic than a typical csv/tsv 
format.  The application still has to know about the data type, of 
course.

> I am not seeing JSON listed among python's standard libraries for 
> version 2.4.4. Is this something that has to be independently 
> installed?

Yes.  The json module was 'only' added in Python 2.6.  If you wanted 
to operate on JSON in Python 2.4, you had to use something called 
simplejson [0].  According to this post [0], the standard library 
json module is a(n older) release of the simplejson module.

Anyway, when I found myself stuck in Python-2.4 land (on the stock 
Python shipped with CentOS-5.x, for example), I often saw and wrote 
snippets like this [1]:

   try:  # -- if Python-2.6+, it's in STDLIB
       import json
   except ImportError:  # -- Python-2.4, simplejson
       import simplejson as json

And, then the rest of the program can operate just the same, 
regardless of which one you used.

Good luck,

-Martin

  [0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson/
  [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/712791/what-are-the-differences-between-json-and-simplejson-python-modules

-- 
Martin A. Brown
http://linux-ip.net/