18Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway
2 packages for extracting dates from a string of text in Python

2 packages for extracting dates from a string of text in Python

Pandas, Python
This post will cover two different ways to extract dates from strings with Python. The main purpose here is that the strings we will parse contain additional text - not just the date. Scraping a date out of text can be useful in many different situations. Option 1) dateutil The first option we'll show is using the dateutil package. Here's an example: [code lang="python"] from dateutil.parser import parse parse("Today is 12-01-18", fuzzy_with_tokens=True) [/code] Above, we use a method in dateutil called parse. The first parameter to this method is the string of the text we want to use to search for a date. The second parameter, fuzzy_with_tokens, is set equal to True - this causes the method to return where the date is found in the string. In other words,…
Read More
18Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway

How to change a file’s last modified date with R

File Manipulation, R
This relatively quick post goes through how to change a file's last modified date with base R. How to change a file's modified time with R Let's say we have a file, test.txt. What if we want to change the last modified date of the file (let's suppose the file's not that important)? Let's say, for instance, we want to make a file have a last modified date back in the 1980's. We can do that with one line of code. First, let's use file.info to check the current modified date of some file called test.txt. [code lang="R"] file.info("test.txt") [/code] We can see above by looking at mtime that this file was last modified December 4th, 2018. Now, we can use a function called Sys.setFileTime to change the modified date…
Read More
10Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway
10 R functions for Linux commands and vice-versa

10 R functions for Linux commands and vice-versa

File Manipulation, R, System Administration
This post will go through 10 different Linux commands and their R alternatives. If you're interested in learning more R functions for working with files like some of those below, also check out this post. How to list all the files in a directory Linux R What does it do? ls list.files() Lists all the files in a directory ls -R list.files(recursive = TRUE) Recursively lists all the files in a directory and all sub-directories ls | grep "something" list.files(pattern = "something") Lists all the files in a directory containing the regex "something" R [code lang="R"] list.files("/path/to/directory") list.files("/path/to/do/directory", recursive = TRUE) # search for files containing "something" in their name list.files("/path/to/do/directory", pattern = "something") # search for all CSV files list.files("/path/to/do/directory", pattern = ".csv") [/code] Linux [code lang="bash"] ls /path/to/directory…
Read More
10Dec 2018 by Andrew Treadway

Intro to Python Course

Python
For anyone in the NYC area, I am offering an in-person introductory Python course on January 7th, 2019. The description of the workshop is below. Please see here to register on Eventbrite. Want to learn Python? Consider attending this workshop! This hands-on class will be a great introduction for how to code in Python, the important features of the language, and will help you build a strong foundation for learning more in the future! Overview This course provides a workshop for introducing you to Python. We'll walk through how to write and run Python programs, when to use particular data structures, how to handle different data types, and more. The class will be a great start in learning one of the most versatile, powerful programming languages being used today! All…
Read More