The easiest way to approach this (and the other exercises) is to iterate through each line in the file and create a list. Then, do the sorting:

records_list = []
f = open(yourfilename, 'r')
for line in f:
    name, sex, babies = line.strip().split(',')
    row = [name, sex, int(babies)]
    records_list.append(row)

Another way to approach this, if you’ve forgotten how a for-loop can iterate through a file object:

records_list = []
lines = open(yourfilename, 'r').readlines()
for line in lines:
    name, sex, babies = line.strip().split(',')
    row = [name, sex, int(babies)]
    records_list.append(row)

What does that for-loop do? Well, records_list now contains a list of lists, as opposed to just a list of strings.

In other words, the above for-loop turned each line (a string):

"Emma,F,20799"

Into a list object, containing 3 objects:

["Emma", "F", 20799]

Now, we just need to:

• Sort babylist in reverse order of its third element, e.g. the baby count.
• Then loop through just the first 10 elements, and print the results.

A partial answer for c.py:

(You can also view it on Github)

from os.path import join

DATADIR = 'tempdata'
FPATH = join(DATADIR, 'ssa-babynames-nationwide-2014.txt')

Now we need to create a dictionary derived from the data in which every name is a key and points to the total number of babies (i.e. both “M” and “F”) e.g.

  {
      'Mackenzie': 4152
      'Christopher': 10293
  }

namesdict = {}
with open(FPATH) as f:
    for line in f:
        name, sex, babies = line.strip().split(',')
        if namesdict.get(name):
            namesdict[name] += int(babies)
        else:
            namesdict[name] = int(babies)

This is necessary because the assignment requires that we select the longest names from a list of names, each of which have been given to at least 2,000 babies – M and F – so we need to basically rebuild a list that is gender-agnostic and is just a list of names and numbers.

After namesdict is populated, we filter it to include only key-value pairs, in which the value (i.e. number of babies) is at least 2,000, as per the assignment requirements.

Then, finally, with that filtered list of “popular” names, you can then sort it by length of name, then number of babies.

Follow the process in b.py, in which we write a for-loop just to make a list of lists from the file…but with one twist…use an if-statement to only append rows which meet a certain condition…i.e. the name contains at least one "x":

x_list = []
f = open(yourbabynamesfilename, 'r')
for line in f:
    name, sex, babies = line.strip().split(',')
    if "SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHNG":
        row = [name, sex, int(babies)]
        x_list.append(row)

Then you can do two for-loops two create two new lists from x_list, one in which the gender is F and M respectively, and sort them in descending order of count. Then iterate through each list for the top 5 names.

There’s more graceful ways to do it, but whatever makes sense to you with the least amount of typing…