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I have a problem with the following code:

inputf = open('test.dat', 'r') lines = inputf.readlines() rico_clus_e = [] for line in lines: line.split() print line if (line[0] != '#'): rico_clus_e.append(float(line[4])) inputf.close()

My test.dat file is:

# specn rico_all rico_all_e rico_clus rico_clus_e rico_farclust rico_far_e extin a119 1.07038692 0.11109547 0.61473431 0.15063627 0.32590239 0.14777812 0.207

And this gives the following output in my terminal:

# specn rico_all rico_all_e rico_clus rico_clus_e rico_farclust rico_far_e extin a119 1.07038692 0.11109547 0.61473431 0.15063627 0.32590239 0.14777812 0.207 Traceback (most recent call last): File "test.py", line 8, in <module> rico_clus_e.append(float(line[4])) ValueError: could not convert string to float:

I'm quite confused by this. It had nothing to do with spaces, I checked them all. And if you change 4 by 1, 2 or 3 this works, so it must have something to do with the test.dat file, but I can't seem to figure out how. I'm using python 2.7.3.

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  • The representation (hint: repr()) of the element is...? Commented Jun 3, 2013 at 20:44
  • The representation is ' ' Commented Jun 3, 2013 at 20:52

1 Answer 1

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line.split() on its own does nothing to line. You must store the result of the method call and use that instead.

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3 Comments

But why does it work for the other values? Changing 4 to 3, 2 or 1 does work... For number 3, the representation is '9', for element 2 it's '1'
That's because line[3] is '9', and line[2] is '1'. And line[0] is 'a'.
Okay, I understand your response now. It thought that '9' was something internal, but it just refers to the string. line = line.split() is the thing that did the trick. Thx!

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