Home Original page

Seperating CSV rows into new, seperate files

TonyB anthonybol2 at netscape.net
Fri Aug 13 23:40:03 EDT 2004 
Hi,
I've searched the group and need more information and guidance on this
issue I need to resolve next week. I work for the local school system
and I am working on a way to parse a CSV file of class lists from MS
Excel.  It is a ~2MB file with all teachers and all their classes in
it.  I thought I would use Python to do this since many people I know
tell me how great it is.  The real sticking point is there are
duplicates of each teacher's classes embedded in the file (don't ask
why).  I want to break up the source file into the seperate class
files without duplication and use the teachers name, coursecode and
section in the filename.

Example Data:
Last Name	First Name	Grade	Period	Teacher Name	
SMITH           JOHN	         8      1	JONES	SALLY

Student ID		Course Code	Course Title	
12345678	        1234	         ALGEBRA I

Course Section	Session
1	        0


The course code and section number are the same in the duplicate
classes.  The difference is that the session number changes.   I'm
thinking that I will need to somehow iterate through the lines and
break the class when the course code changes and/or section change
(course codes can be the same but section numbers change with each
class).  Then I have to monitor the session number to see if there is
a duplicate course code and section but a different session number
would indicate that the class is a duplicate. Essentially, the session
number will be 0, 1, or 2 for a total of three lists of the same
class. Hopefully that makes sense.  Again don't ask why the data is
like this.

My humble attempts have not been very successful.  I've been trying
the csv modules to read the file but I am not sure how to procede
after that.

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.
More information about the Python-list mailing list