Fixed width to csv conversion

[Caraka]

Greetings, I'm a python newbie struggling with the obvious. I have a txt file with fixed width whitespace between the elements. Excel can't import directly because the size of the whitespace varies between columns. I have stripped the header out leaving only data.

This is the code I've tried to date, which up to a point gives me a beautiful list 'out' that is comma separated. Trying to write that to a clean .csv is proving fruitless. Any suggestions?

import sys
import csv

input = open(sys.argv[1])

lines = 0
hits = 0
out = list()

while 1:
    record = input.readline()
    if record == "": break
    lines += 1
    out.extend(record.split())
    #print record,
    hits += 1

print "Processed",hits,"out of",lines

#writer = csv.writer(open("f:/CalcOut.csv", "wb"))
#writer.writerows(out)
#writer.close()

sample of 'out' list:

How to get the list above into csv is the real question?
What command to use to close the output file?

input style:

0.125000 790101 0300 1.036 77.7 69.0 0.2100 0.1919 4.611 5.210 22.3 0.2533 4.201 80.5 4.143 0.692 2.4472e+003 77.5 2.3896e+003 5.2775e+002 2.1319e+003 1.2015e+003 2.4524e+003 2.1446e+003 1.1897e+003 1.031 4.603 2.5005e+003 2.2698e+003 1.0489e+003 0.974 4.537

That's one line of input data, consisting of 32 elements. My sample file has 10 lines, my real work has 59,000 lines. It will just fit into excel for further analysis.

Cheers
Caraka

[katharnakh]

import csv

rf = open('sample.txt')     #input file handle
wf = open('writer.csv','w') #output file handle

writer = csv.writer(wf)

for row in rf.readlines():
    writer.writerow(row.split())

rf.close()  # close input file handle
wf.close()  # close output file hanle

kath.

[Caraka]

Brilliant katharnakh! I knew it had to be simple, I've just been looking at it too long. Many thanks, I can now get onto the task of analising the data itself. Process time for 16Mb file = 43 seconds.

[ysrmkp]

Hi Katharnak,

is the code u gave is a xl macro? just to know.

Thanks

[dave8]

This code only works for space separated files. It will not work for fixed width positional files.

[TrustyTony]

This code only works for space separated files. It will not work for fixed width positional files.

The input given is not positional, but variable width. You can see, if you look given input by clicking reply for the original post (as it has no code tags).

Fixed width input would be anyway even simpler as you only need to do simple slices from input line.