You are right there is no need for that extra assignment. sys.exit() takes care of exiting. I changed the code already.

Thanks a lot.

Paulo

In the above second script, before sys.exit(), there is a new value ‘False’ reassigned to ‘fileinput’.
Is it really necessary for that? I think ‘sys.exit()’, by itself, can end ‘while’ loop and script.

Thanks!
Dilmurat

You are right, the %s are not necessary as you already have a string. Basically they do not work to convert inmotif to a string but basically put the variable in the %s argument. IT is a not a pythonic way of doing things but it is at first more didactic for those who come from other languages.

I believe in further entries I used the re.compile() without %s.

Cheers

Paulo

Probably just a novice question, but in the program code_05.py, in the line:

motif = re.compile(‘%s’, % inmotif)

why is the (‘%s’, %) necessary? Is it to convert inmotif into a string before compilation?.

The program seems to work with just:

motif = re.compile(inmotif)

and I had the impression that raw_input() always returned a string. For example, you have to convert the count in

count = raw_input(“enter an integer”)
count = int(count)

otherwise you get an error message when you then write:

count += 2

The only thing I can think of is that, if you reuse the code and inmotif doesn’t come from raw_input and isn’t a string, the ‘%s’, % would prevent an error.

Sorry, this has turned into a rather wordy question on a rather minor point.

Thanks,

Joe

Thanks for spotting the error. I already corrected it. Ideally, you should change

seqlist = open(dnafile, ‘r’).readlines()

to

seqlist = open(filename, ‘r’).readlines()

Sorry for the delay in replying. I was away for a couple of days.

Paulo

I think I have found a minor error in one of the sample programs in the repository.

In code_06.py, there is the line:

seqlist = open(dnafile, ‘r’).readlines()

This produces the error meassage:

TypeError: coercing Unicode: need string or buffer, file found

I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think the problem is that the variable dnafile contains, not the name of a file but the contents of a file, assigned in a previous line of the program:

dnafile = open(filename, ‘r’)

So, when I replace the error-generating line with:

seqlist = dnafile.readlines()

I don’t get the error message, and the program works just fine.
I don’t think the sample program is referred to in the tutorial. But it slowed me down for a while, so maybe it’s worth correcting. (If indeed I’m right in my analysis).

I’d like to thank you again for the tutorial. It’s very clear, and progresses smoothly from the simple to the complex.

Joe