Dennis Lee Bieber wrote, on Sunday, January 01, 2017 6:07 PM > > On Sun, 1 Jan 2017 15:50:25 -0800, "Deborah Swanson" > <pyt...@deborahswanson.net> declaimed the following: > > >Maybe it would help if I give a couple rows of (made up) > data to show > >what I mean (first row is field titles): > > > >......Description Date State/co Kind > >Notes > >l1 2 br, Elk Plains 12-26 WA/pi house > >garage, w/d > >l2 2 br, Elk Plains 12-29 > > > >In this case, I want to copy the values from l1 to l2. > > > >Or I could have, say, if I didn't see the one on 12-26 until after > >12-29: > >l1 2 br, Elk Plains 12-26 > >l2 2 br, Elk Plains 12-29 WA/pi house > >garage, w/d > > > >In this case, I want to copy the values from l2 to l1. > > > > And what happens if the data (where ever you get it > from to be in one > file) looks like > > l1 2 br, Elk Plains 12-26 WA/pi > l2 2 br, Elk Plains 12-29 > house garage, w/d > > As I understand your logic, you intend to make the two > entries identical EXCEPT for the DATE. What purpose does this > duplication serve? Or, put another way -- why is preserving > distinctive dates important while everything else is subject > to being blended.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing in this bit of code, making all the listings that are identical except for the date be identical except for the date. You may or may not have tried this approach to finding the ideal house, but this is my third house hunt, using essentially the same approach, but in a different language each time. (Python is by far the best version. A dictionary with city names as keys, and several data items as values has literally cut the task in half.) The usefulness of keeping track of these duplicate listings is history of the rental being offered. In a real estate market that's on fire like we have here in the Pacific NW, any house that's relisted more than a couple times has something wrong with it or it would have been snatched up, or it's way out in the boonies. In any event, if I do decide to look at it, my bargaining position is improved by knowing that they've been trying to rent it for a long friggin time. When I find a new one that looks promising, I may reject it if I see that it's been on the market a long time (and I have another bit of code that tells me that instantly). You can design your project any way you want to! > I still get this feeling you should have master file, > regardless of whether fields are empty, and treat subsequent > data as updates to the master file -- not as some confusing > single file with some sort of duplicate contents. > -- > Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN > wlfr...@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but my method is time-tested for my purposes. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
