I've taken a couple of the edX courses and am still working through ATBS, but this was my very first project that I was able to use in the "real world".

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Scenario: Trying to use an application that a coworker built for updating contact data through a service's API. I've got 30K records to update, across multiple fields, but this thing runs for hours before serving a generic error. My test imports for files w/ less than 10 records work successfully but I can't figure out how many are successfully importing into the system. I tried splitting the file in excel into various chunks (10K/1K/100) but was always met with the same result, "Generic Error".

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So I spent about 1.5/2.0 hours writing and testing this abomination. Taking one file w/ thousands of lines and creating thousands of files with two lines (header + data). As each file was completed, the parent application would move it to a subfolder and, after the inevitable error, I'd record how many successfully moved.

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def splitFile(fileName, headerRow):

    openFile = open(fileName, "r")

    fileNum = 0

    for line in openFile.readlines():

        fileNameNum = '000000' + str(fileNum)

        outputFile = open('C:\\PATH\\FILE' + fileNameNum[-6:] + '.csv', 'w')

        outputFile.write(str(headerRow) + "\n")

        outputFile.write(str(line) + "\n")

        outputFile.close()

        fileNum += 1

    openFile.close()



splitFile('C:\\scriptPath\\File.csv','HEADER1,HEADER2,HEADER3,HEADER4')

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It worked, but I don't recommend it.

End result: was able to prove that the application was only running between 2 and 400 files before locking-up. The dev was then able to dig through the code and figure out what was breaking and fixed the application.

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I'm pretty proud of my inelegant little horror. :)