HELP Newbie solve this Problem

[Mark Hathaway]

>> On Fri, 24 Mar 2000 03:43:38 GMT, race9047 at my-deja.com declaimed the
>> following in comp.lang.python:
>>
>> 7 a
>> 12 b
>> 16 c
>> . . .
>> 3 z
>> But the real challenge is to invert the list to look like this:
>> a 7
>> b 12
>> c 16
>> . . .
>> z 3
>>

> Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
>
>         I must be from a different world then... The second part is what
> I'd find easy... even in FORTRAN (maybe too easy in FORTRAN)
>
>         integer counts(26)      / 26 * 0 /      ! or is it 0 * 26?
>         character       line*132        ! set for the longest line the
>                                         ! the data file can contain
>         open(10, file="data", status="old")
>         read(10, '(a132)', iostat=ios) line
>    10   continue
>         if (ios .eq. 0) then
>             do 20 i=1, 132              ! or the line length max
>                 if (line(i:i) .ge. 'a' .and. line(i:i) .le. 'z') then
>                         inx = ichar(line(i:i)) - ichar('a') + 1
>                         counts(inx) = counts(inx) + 1
>                 elseif (line(i:i) .ge. 'A' .and. line(i:i) .le. 'Z')
>      x                                                  then
>                         inx = ichar(line(i:i)) - ichar('A') + 1
>                         counts(inx) = counts(inx) + 1
>                 else
>                         continue        ! just my style
>                 endif
>    20       continue
>             read(10, '(a132)', iostat=ios) line
>         goto 10
>         endif
>         close(10)
>         do 30 i=1, 26
>             print *, char(i), '     ', counts(i)
>    30   continue
>         stop
>
>         It would look much cleaner in Python, and I'd use case
> conversion modules rather than the duplicates in the IF statements...

I can't really believe the Fartran code takes that much space.
I suspect it's given as a set-up, so the Python code to follow
will be all the more impressive. Well, here's a Python version.

import string
lines = open('file.txt').readlines()
for each in lines:
    eachlist = string.split(each)
    str = eachlist[1] + " " + eachlist[0]
    print str

If you'd wanted the output printed back to a file then you could
add something other than the final 'print str' statement.

Amazing isn't it? When a language doesn't get in your way the code
is brief and more readable. It's all the niggling little details
that a language like Fortran or C require that makes them very ugly.


Mark Hathaway
e-mail: hathawa2 at marshall.edu