On Fri, 19 Feb 2016 10:53 pm, wrong.addres...@gmail.com wrote: >> See http://nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html for a list of >> parsers that can do all sorts for you. Or the stdlib re module > > I am an engineer, and do not understand most of the terminology used > there.
Google, or the search engine of your choice, is your friend. https://duckduckgo.com/html/ https://startpage.com/eng/? Wikipedia even more so: Wikipedia has lots of good, useful articles on computing concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computing And use the search box visible at the top of every page. Or ask here. > And do I need something fancy to read a line of numbers? Should it > not be built into the language? In your own words: "I will have to read data given to me by people, which may not come in nice formats like CSV" I trust that you don't expect the language to come with pre-written functions to read numbers in every imaginable format. If you do, you will be disappointed -- no language could possible do this. To answer your question "Do I need something fancy...?", no, of course not, reading a line of numbers from a text file is easy. with open("numbers.txt", "r") as f: for line in f: numbers = [int(s) for s in split(line)] will read and convert integer-valued numbers separated by whitespace like: 123 654 9374 1 -45 3625 one line at a time. You can then collate them for later use, or process them as you go. If they're floating point numbers, change the call to int() to a call to float(). -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
