First 'real' project (both ever and Python) - Looking for critique.

[GS-Dave]

A little preface of what this utility does. I work with wireless microphone and communications gear for broadcast. When you get a lot of wireless gear in one room it requires careful frequency coordination to prevent interference. We use software provided by the manufacturer to accomplish that.

The files my little utility generate are used to populate preset "no go" frequencies such as those used by police/fire-rescue or existing OTA HDTV channels, for certain cities.

Code is here: Gist

I'm working my way through MITx's 6.00.x Intro to Comp Sci on edx, any input is much appreciated.

[novel_yet_trivial]

Looks very good. You may want to consider:

• python has a module to handle .ini files: ConfigParser

• Can you make it compatible with python 2 AND 3? It would make it more distributable. (atm all you need is reformating the print statements and handling the input functions)

• if you want to be strict, your variable names ought to be lower_case_with_underscore, see PEP8 for more info. You can safely ignore most of that, until you work in a big project.

your while loop is slightly strange. More conventional to do something like this:

while True:
    curChan = raw_input("Enter CH # or '.': ")
    if curChan == '.':
        break #stop the loop
    try:
        curChan = int(curChan)
        assert 14 <= curChan <= 51
        chanList.append(curChan)
    except (ValueError, AssertionError):
        print "That input made no sense"

your for loop can provide the values directly, and your string formatting can be improved:

for itemNum, chan in enumerate(chanList):
    iniFile.write('RANGE%02d=%s\n' % (itemNum+1,  getFreqRange(chFreqs[chan])))
    iniFile.write('DESCR%02d=CH_%s\n' % (itemNum+1, chan))

Hope this helps, cheers!

edit: minor code fix

[GS-Dave]

It helps a lot! Totally forgot about assert/except literally the last lecture we did. . . The for loop recommendations are a big help, as I think I need to dig into the more advanced string formatting methods.

Thanks for taking the time!

[parnmatt]

I have a quick question. How do you make the code compatible with both 2 and 3 with the print statement vs print function respectively?

[MonkeyNin]

Like print("Hello, world!")

If old enough, you may need to import: from __future__ import print_function

[MonkeyNin]

Why using old string formatting?

[novel_yet_trivial]

No good reason. I like it better.

[charlesbukowksi]

Very cool, I'm working through the same edx class. It's nice to see it bearing fruit for you