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Basic Python Exercises

  • This exercise aims to perform a moderately complicated set of operations using most of the topics covered over the course.
  • For this exercise you will require 5 text files, each containing 2 columns of data: a timestamp and a value.

Exercise

  1. Build a list containing the 5 filenames of the text files that are going to be used. (Hint: Can be done by hand or using the os.listdir(‘dirpath’) function in the os module)
  2. Add a bogus file name that doesn’t exist to the list (so that we have to do some error handling)
  3. Loop over the list and for each file (Remember here that we have a non existent file in the list and calling open on this will result in an IOError exception that needs to be dealt with)
    1. Open the file;
    2. Loop over each line;
    3. Split the line up into sections (Hint: The string has a .split() function that splits the string on whitespace and gives back a list with each section as an element of the list)
    4. Convert the second column value into an float
    5. Keep track of the values for each line and compute an average for the file.
  4. Finally, print out a list of file,average-value pairs