How to automate list separation. NOOB

[perfringo]

Look at EDIT in my previous post.

This code should be amended so that two first rows are ignored (where is no data). The could look like:

with open('buoys.txt', 'r') as f:
    rows = (row.strip() for row in f)
    header, header_2 = next(rows), next(rows)
    nums = (float(row.split()[-1]) for row in rows if float(row.split()[-1]) != 9999.0)
    max_value = max(nums)

EDIT:

You can iterate over files and perform same operation, assuming that you have list of files you want to look for max value:

file_list = ['buoys.txt', 'buoys_2.txt']   # long list of filenames. If in one directory you can us os.listdir() to get this list

file_max_values = []

for file in file_list:
    with open(file, 'r') as f:
        rows = (row.strip() for row in f)
        header, header_2 = next(rows), next(rows)
        nums = (float(row.split()[-1]) for row in rows if float(row.split()[-1]) != 9999.0)
        file_max_values.append(max(nums))

max_value = max(file_max_values)