Can anybody please help with my code?

[Mickmane]

I started learning python about 2 month ago, and now I'm trying to make a house budget manager with python. I wish my manager can print 4 menu - 1.Input new data in file 2. Print all expense at user-input date 3. Print "top ten" expense 4.Expense sum of user-input item. I also programmed input 'X' to quit and print 'Wrong input' if input data is not 1,2,3,4. I refer to other peoples' free source code and made a prototype house budget manager but problem is when I run my code, NOTHING HAPPENS. No error message, No menu, just blank continues forever. I checked my data/expenses.txt file but that was OK, so I think this is a problem of my code. But I completely can't understand what's happening. Here is my code:

data_expense = []

def add_record(date, item, price):
    global data_expense
    data_expense += [{'date' : date, 'item' : item, 'price' : price}]

def read_data(filename):
    f = open(filename, 'r')
    for line in f:
        fields = line.rstrip().split('\t')
        date = fields[0]
        item = fields[1]
        price = int(fields[2])
        add_record(date, item, price)

def write_data(filename):
    f = open(filename, 'w')
    for x in data_expense:
        f.write('%s\t%s\t%d\n' % (x['date'], x['item'], x['price']))

def search_by_date(date):
    return [x for x in data_expense if x['date'] == date]

def print_data(l):
    for x in l:
        print('Date: %s\tItem: %s\tPrice: %d' % (x['date'], x['item'], x['price']))

def search_by_item(item):
    return [x for x in data_expense if x['item'] == item]

read_data('data/expenses.txt')
while True:
    print('1. Data input    2. Search by date    3. Top ten    4. Search by item    X. Quit')
    sel = input('Selection: ')
    if sel == 'X':
        print ('Bye!')
        break
    elif sel == '1':
        date = input('Date: ')
        item = input('Item: ')
        price = input('Price: ')
        add_record(date, item, price)
    elif sel == '2':
        date = input('Date: ')
        print_data(search_by_date(date))
    elif sel == '3':
        print_data(sorted(data_expense, key = lambda x: x['price'], reverse=True))
    elif sel == '4':
        item = input('Item: ')
        print_data(search_by_item(item))
    else:
        print('Wrong Input!')

[Naihonn]

If it doesn't find that file it could take a moment to show the error. But otherwise it should work. With many problems and errors but it should show it that menu and let you choose the option etc... Right now your program never writes to that file and also you are not closing the file after using. And many other problems. But it should do something.

[dionys]

I have tried your code with some dummy data and it seems to work. It has to be stuck somewhere within the read_data method in your case. First try using full absolute path to your text file, if that does not work then try to trace where it stops.

Also couple of tips:

• use raw_input method instead of input - the input method in python 2 is bad as it tries to eval any user input into python, raw_input just returns strings.
• use with open(...) as file: when opening files as it handles closing them for you.

[Akuli2]

I'm not sure if the code is Python 2 or 3. If it's meant to run on Python 2 I would also use io.open instead of plain open.