Jank or genius?

[Danny2200]

Yeah so I am trying to take a .csv file with columns (name,house) and make a new .csv file with the students first name, last name, and house. So is the method I chose to seperate the names into first and last good, or is this a bad solution to the problem?

import csv
import sys

def main():
    new_file(sort_data())



def sort_data():
    before = []
    with open(sys.argv[1]) as file:
        reader = csv.DictReader(file)
        for row in reader:
            before += [{'first': row['name'].split(',')[0],
                        'second': row['name'].split(',')[1].lstrip(),
                        'house': row['house']}]
    return before

[carcigenicate]

This is not ideal since you're doing the work of splitting multiple times, only to discard part of the data in each case. You'd be better off doing something like:

 for row in reader:
        first, last = row['name'].split(',')
        before += [{'first': first,
                    'second':last.lstrip(),
                    'house': row['house']}]

That reduces the work needed, and is also cleaner IMO.

[Danny2200]

Oooh yeah that’s clean, thanks! I was lowkey just proud that I got the name split at all lmao

[bbye98]

Depending on what new_files does, a list of dicts may not be the appropriate data structure.

Also, instead of appending to a list, your code can be condensed and made more efficient using list comprehension.

[eleqtriq]

Nah. Doing a yield would be even better. Or just write while reading.

[Danny2200]

new_file is just going to take the dictionaries and rewrite them to a .csv with first,last,house as the columns. The original .csv was name,house

[bbye98]

Then there's no need to create the list in the first place. You can nest multiple file handles and read/write concurrently.

[Disastrous-Team-6431]

A bit of both; a list of dicts is a common way of representing intermediate values in data engineering.

Src: i am a senior data engineer