maurizio wrote:

i tryed to use the module max of numpy,
the problem is that i don't know how to put the column of the file in an array.
(i'm new in phyton).
anyway if you think there is a better way.....

What kind of file is it? Did you pick numpy because you want to do matrix operations (beyond just finding a maximum value), or was it just the first thing you stumbled upon when researching the problem?

A simple pattern for finding the maximum value in a file, using only plain Python code, is:

    max_value = ... some very small value ...
    for line in file:
         value = ... extract value from line ...
         if value > max_value:
             max_value = value

If it's not obvious what "some very small value" is, given the range of data you're working with, you can do

    max_value = None
    for line in file:
         value = ... extract value from line ...
         if max_value is None or value > max_value:
             max_value = value

instead (this leaves max_value set to None if the file is empty)

A more experienced Python hacker might write

    def get_all_values(file):
        for line in file:
            value = ... extract value from line ...
            yield value

    ...

    max_value = max(get_all_values(file))

instead. But this still leaves us with the problem of extracting the value. The best way to do that depends on the kind of files you're working with; for fixed-format text files, you could use string slicing and int/float for conversion (e.g. "value = float(line[10:20])", see the tutorial for details); for other text formats, you could use split/partition or regular expressions, or maybe an existing module (such as "csv"); for binary formats, there's a large
number of existing tools.

And if you really want to use numpy for other reasons than just getting a maximum value from a column, there's plenty of stuff in NumPy and SciPy (http://www.scipy.org/) that might be useful.

So, in other words, I guess we still need more info.

</F>

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