programming assignment

[mario]

You are going to write a program that reads data from a file into a list and allows the user to query and modify the data. You may assume that the file is formatted properly for this assignment.


Design specifications: The program must use lists. For full credit, the program should read all data from one file (see Appendix A). For slightly less credit (-5), the program could read all data from four files (one for names, one for continents, one for populations, and one for areas) (see Appendix B). For less credit than that (-10), the program can hard-code in the three lists of data (see Appendix C). (Start with hard-coded lists, get the program working, and then work on reading in the lists from files.) For each menu option, there should be a function that takes the lists as parameters. There should be no global variables.

[Mekire]

Sounds like fun.  Hope you get an A.

[DeaD_EyE]

Reading data from four files line by line sounds cool. This remind me to look into contextlib.
Example without modification of data:

import contextlib
import sys


def read_files_iterative(filenames):
    with contextlib.ExitStack() as stack:
        try:
            files = [stack.enter_context(open(fname)) for fname in filenames]
        except (FileNotFoundError, PermissionError) as e:
            print(e, file=sys.stderr)
            raise
        for data in zip(*files):
            yield data

def main():
    if len(sys.argv) != 5:
        print('4 Filenames are required')
        return 1
    filenames = sys.argv[1:5]
    try:
        for row in read_files_iterative(filenames):
            print(row)
    except:
        return 2
    # putting them into a list:
    # content = list(read_files_iterative(filenames))
    # print(content)
    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    # be a nice shell citizen and return an error code
    sys.exit(main())

Conclusion: This code won't help you and it does not fit to your professors requirements.