Lists

Nested Lists 2

One of your collaborators has posted a comma-delimited text file online for you to analyze. The file contains dimensions of a series of shrubs (ShrubID, Length, Width, Height) and they need you to determine their volumes. You could do this using a spreadsheet, but the project that you are working on is going to be generating lots of these files so you decide to write a program to automate the process.

The following function will download the text from the web and return it as a list of lists:

def get_file_from_web(url):
    """Download CSV data from web"""
    webpage = urllib.urlopen(url)
    datareader = csv.reader(webpage)
    data = []
    for row in datareader:
        data.append(row)
    return data

It requires the use of the urllib and csv modules, so you will need to import those modules before using the function.

Use this function to download the data and then use a for loop to calculate the volumes and return a list of lists where the first item in each sublist contains the ShrubID and the second item contains the volume. There should be one sublist for each ShrubID. Once you have created this list, use another for loop to print out each combination of ShrubID and volume on it’s own line in a string like ‘The volume of shrub a1 is 22.5.’

Data Science in Omics Introduction

Lists

Nested Lists 2