I need to read in a large number of .txt files, each of which contains a decimal (some are positive, some are negative), and append these into 2 arrays (genotypes and phenotypes). Subsequently, I wish to perform some mathematical operations on these arrays in scipy, however the negative ('-') symbol is causing problems. Specifically, I cannot convert the arrays to float, because the '-' is being read as a string, causing the following error:
ValueError: could not convert string to float:
Here is my code as it's currently written:
import linecache
gene_array=[]
phen_array=[]
for i in genotype:
for j in phenotype:
genotype='/path/g.txt'
phenotype='/path/p.txt'
g=linecache.getline(genotype,1)
p=linecache.getline(phenotype,1)
p=p.strip()
g=g.strip()
gene_array.append(g)
phen_array.append(p)
gene_array=map(float,gene_array)
phen_array=map(float,phen_array)
I am fairly certain at this point that it is the negative sign that is causing the problem, but it is not clear to me why. Is my use of Linecache the problem here? Is there an alternative method that would be better?
The result of
print gene_array
is
['-0.0448022516321286', '-0.0236187263814157', '-0.150505384829925', '-0.00338459268479522', '0.0142429109897682', '0.0286253352284279', '-0.0462358095345649', '0.0286232317578776', '-0.00747425206137217', '0.0231790239373428', '-0.00266935581919541', '0.00825077426011094', '0.0272744527203547', '0.0394829854063242', '0.0233109171715023', '0.165841084392078', '0.00259693465334536', '-0.0342590874424289', '0.0124600520095644', '0.0713627590092807', '-0.0189374898081401', '-0.00112750710611284', '-0.0161387333242288', '0.0227226505624106', '0.0382173405035751', '0.0455518646388402', '-0.0453048799717046', '0.0168570746329513']
解决方案
The issue seems to be with empty string or space as evident from your error message
ValueError: could not convert string to float:
To make it work, convert the map to a list comprehension
gene_array=[float(e) for e in gene_array if e]
phen_array=[float(e) for e in phen_array if e]
By empty string means
float(" ") or float("") would give value errors, so if any of the items within gene_array or phen_array has space, this will throw an error while converting to float
There could be many reasons for empty string like
empty or blank line
blank line either at the beginning or end