[portland] Reformatting Data Files

[Ethan Furman]

Rich Shepard wrote:
>   This has worked flawlessly for some of the exported spreadsheet pages.
> Now, however, I have some pages that include the units for the measured
> parameters (e.g., mg/L) which is the third-to-last column in the postgres
> table.
> 
[snip]
>       outdata.writerow([location, sampdate[i], row[0], float(row[i])])

How about a function that either floats your string, or returns the 
string if it's not a number?

Something like this:

--> def flt_or_str(unk):
...     try:
...         return float(unk)
...     except ValueError:
...         return unk
...
--> float("1")
1.0
--> float("hello")
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for float(): hello
--> flt_or_str("1")
1.0
--> flt_or_str("829mg/L")
'829mg/L'


Then your line of codes becomes:

   outdata.writerow([location, sampdate[i], row[0], flt_or_str(row[i])])

Hope this helps!

~Ethan~