line sorting by using python

Question

I have a txt file containing lines as follows (the first field is keywords, the second field is frequency of keywords, and the third field is related texts):

anorexia nervosa    1       &#22312;&#19987;&#21033;&#32593;&#30475;&#21040;&#19968;
glaucoma    10      want to suck out my eyeballs and have them replaced with
cancer  691     there is a drug that helps fight cancer called avastin
gene therapy    1       writing a review paper on gene therapy 
hormone 35      glad my hormone injections end in a month 
depression  259     depression? just made depression cake: recipe here

I want to parse the file like this (keywords sorted by those of keywords' frequency):

cancer  691
depression  259
hormone 35
glaucoma    10
anorexia nervosa    1
gene therapy    1

I check other questions about sort and order problem but I couldn't find any good example. sort() doesn't seem to be worked. Please let me know good start point!

Please don't modify the question substantially after posting. The way you got the data is distracting. Post another question if you want to optimize that or such. — eudoxos
– eudoxos, Commented Oct 8, 2011 at 8:15

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:00:40Z

2

solution by eudoxos will work, you have to split with tabs (\t) ie.,

data=file(yourFile).readlines()
data.sort(key=lambda l: float(l.split('\t')[1]),reverse=True)

Here, by the looks of your input text, I assumes that, the different fields are delimited by tabs.

However, delimits by comma will be a better solution, because, there's a possibility of mixing tabs and spaces.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:00

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Oct 8, 2011 at 11:34

Arun Karunagath

1,59811 silver badges25 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

ooozooo Over a year ago

yeah, you're right. So already I fixed it and tried the code. Thanks!

eudoxos · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-08 08:13:25Z

1

If you have your lines in an array, use key parameter to the sort function; the lambda will split line at spaces/tabs, take the second column, convert to float and use that for comparison. reverse causes the order to be descending (sorry, not tested, but 99% works modulo typing errors):

data=file(yourFile).readlines()
data.sort(key=lambda l: float(l.split()[1]),reverse=True)

answered Oct 8, 2011 at 8:13

eudoxos

19.2k11 gold badges71 silver badges129 bronze badges

4 Comments

ooozooo Over a year ago

I got an error "ValueError: could not convert string to float: nervosa" Do you have idea?

eudoxos Over a year ago

Ah I see, you have spaces between words in the first column. I would suggest that you adjust your data generation procedure to write just one word. Then it will work. As a sidenote, since you generate that text file yourself, why don't you work on the data structures you already have? Another thing, if you have hard time understanding two-liners in python (no offense, I am beginner in many other things), open your data in a spreadsheet and sort it there.

ooozooo Over a year ago

Thanks for your help and comment! Actually my data is over 10,000 lines. So, I couldn't use a spreadsheet.

ooozooo Over a year ago

yeah, it worked very well! I accepted your comments. So I'm running my code to generate data structure differently. Thanks a lot!

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

line sorting by using python

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

4 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

4 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related