[Tutor] Debugging a sort error.

[Cameron Simpson]

On 14Jan2019 09:29, mhysnm1964 at gmail.com <mhysnm1964 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Once again thanks for all the suggestions. It was the input data after 
>all. As I am importing three sheets into python. One of the sheets had 
>one less column.

Semantic nit: "fewer". "less" is for continuous values.

I've had to deal with loosely defined spreadsheets in the past year, and 
ended up with some mapping classes for reading "heading based" CSV and 
Excel sheets, where the first column contains column headings. It reads 
the rows and constructs a namedtuple class for the rows with field names 
based on the headings and then fills in the fields for each subsequent 
row.

The advantage here is that then you can access the column data by name, 
eg:

  row.description

provided the column heading remains the same. See the xl_import function 
from the cs.csvutils module:

  https://pypi.org/project/cs.csvutils/

The code is here:

  https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/lib/python/cs/csvutils.py

Right at the bottom of that file is an example use of xl_import() for a 
worksheet where row 1 is a title and the column names are in row 2.

>On and forward to start working on text pattern exercise which I always 
>have struggled with. Last language I did this in was Perl and had all 
>sorts of headaches. 😊 Python seems cleaner from the reading I have 
>done thus far. Lets see what challenges wait in front of me.

I used to use Perl extensively. I put off moving to Python for too long.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>