Davis, Amelie Y <aydavis <at> purdue.edu> writes: > > Hi All, > > I have a > dbf table outputted by another program that I cannot (I’m pretty sure) > change the format of. > > I use a > dbf reader code found online (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/362715/ > ) to read the table in and I need to sort it on a particular field but this > field has scientific notation in it and when I use the following command, it > seems to ignore the scientific notation which is very problematic outlist = > sorted(records, key=itemgetter(2)) . > > I read > through the help and it says to use ‘%f’ % to change the format but > I’m not sure where to put that in the code (pasted below) as I think I’m > not fully grasping the table structure... PS > > Here’s the data > > >>> db > > [['IN_FID', 'NEAR_FID', > 'NEAR_DIST'], [('N', 9, 0), ('N', 9, 0), ('F', 19, 11)], [53, 55, '
The data type code for the offending column is "F" which is not in the bog-standard dBase III set of C, N, D, and L. The code that you have used merely returns unchanged the character string that finds in the data base. > 1.05646365517e+005'], [53, 6, ' 9.32599134016e+004'], [53, 0, ' > 8.97477154418e+004'], [53, 2, ' 8.96449127749e+004'], [53, 1, ' > 7.88170078501e+004'], [53, 5, ' 8.29281503631e+004'], [53, 4, ' > > >>> > > è The > ‘second item’ should be NEAR_ID = 64 but because of the scientific > notation it returns NEAR_ID = 70. > > > > AND THE CODE > > #################################### > > # code from http://code.activestate.com/recipes/362715/ > > if typ == "N": > value = value.replace('\0', '').lstrip() > if value == '': > value = 0 > elif deci: > value = decimal.Decimal(value) > else: > value = int(value) > elif typ == 'D': > y, m, d = int(value[:4]), int(value[4:6]), > int(value[6:8]) > value = datetime.date(y, m, d) > elif typ == 'L': > value = (value in 'YyTt' and 'T') or (value > in 'NnFf' and 'F') or '?' Missing code: else: raise Exception("Unknown data type " + typ) > result.append(value) > yield result if this is a one-off exercise: go with the post-processing fix that Skip gave you. elif you are interested in a module that cares, is chock-full of assertions, supports several more data type codes (including F) and memo fields (of 3 different varieties), and is not slower: e-mail me. else: raise Exception(":-)") Cheers, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
