Gregory Ewing wrote, on Thursday, April 13, 2017 12:34 AM > > Deborah Swanson wrote: > > Peter Otten wrote, on Wednesday, April 12, 2017 1:45 PM > > > >> Personally I would immediately discard the header row once and for > >> all, not again and again on every operation. > > > > Well, perhaps, but I need the header row to stay in place > to write the > > list to a csv when I'm done > > That's no problem, just write the header row separately. > > Do this at the beginning: > > header = [Record._make(fieldnames)] > records = [Record._make(row) for row in rows] > > and then to write out the file: > > writer = csv.writer(outputfile) > writer.writerow(header) > writer.writerows(records) > > > There might be a tiny performance edge in discarding the header row > > for the sort, but there would also be a hit to recreate it > at output > > time. > > It's not about performance, it's about keeping the code as > clean and simple as you can, thus making it easier to > understand and maintain. > > The general idea to take away from this is that it's almost > always best to arrange things so that a given collection > contains just one kind of data, so you can treat every > element of it in exactly the same way. > > -- > Greg
That's good advice and I'll rewrite it that way, after I have the code I started with to answer the other questions. I certainly know I have a lot to learn about writing good code, and I can see that what you're suggesting is much cleaner than what I had. Thanks, Deborah -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
