[Tutor] make code less ugly/more pythonic?

[ashleigh smythe]

Greetings!  I've written a little script to process a text file.  It
does exactly what I want it to do but as I'm a newbie I'm sure it's very
ugly and brute force - I wondered if anyone had a moment to please take
a look and tell me how to improve it?  For instance I have a function
that calls a function that calls a function!  Is that awkard and
unpythonic?  Should the whole thing be in a class - how would I do that?

The program simply parses a file that has 10,000 iterations of the
following:


Strict consensus of 1 tree:

Statistics derived from consensus tree:

     Component information (consensus fork) = 185 (normalized = 0.964)
     Nelson-Platnick term information = 3855
     Nelson-Platnick total information = 4040
     Mickevich's consensus information = 0.183
     Colless weighted consensus fork (proportion max. information) =
0.216
     Schuh-Farris levels sum = 0 (normalized = 0.000)
     Rohlf's CI(1) = 0.989
     Rohlf's -ln CI(2) = 948.111 (CI(2) = 0.00)


I want to extract that Component information (consensus fork) value (185
in this instance) from each of the 10,000 "paragraphs" of data in the
file and get an average of that value.


Below is the code I hacked together- please don't laugh!!!  :-)

Thanks for any imput,

Ashleigh

import re
import sys
import string

def make_int(mylist):                     #turns the list of consensus 
    an_int_list=[int(n) for n in mylist]  #fork values from strings to
    return an_int_list                    #integers so I can average
                                          #them.
def add_up(mylist):                       #calls function to turn
    int_list=make_int(mylist)             #strings into          
    asum=0                                #integers.
    for x in int_list:                    #sums up all the values
        asum +=x
    return asum

def average(mylist):                      #takes the sum of consensus
    sum=add_up(mylist)                    #fork values and finds their  
    length=len(mylist)                    #average.
    average_confork=sum/length
    return average_confork

mainlist=[]                               #initialize the list of 
                                          #consensus fork values.
def search(file_to_search):               
    infile=open(file_to_search, 'r')
    for line in infile:
        if re.search('Component', line):  #searches the input file for
            confork=line[45:49]           #line containing cons. fork,
            mainlist.append(confork)      #removes the value and puts 
    return mainlist                       #it into a list.

def aveconfork(file_to_search):           #this executes the whole thing
    thelist=search(file_to_search)        #so I start the program with 
    finalaverage=average(mainlist)        #aveconfork.aveconfork
    return finalaverage                   #('file_to_search')