Workshop 3 - Automating Tasks with Loops

Workshop goal

To learn how to automate tasks in Python, including working with multiple files.

Episodes and questions

Episode title	Topics covered	Questions answered
3.1 Repeating Actions with Loops	How can I do the same operations on many different values?
3.2 Repeating Actions Over Multiple Files	libraries, paths, reading data, manipulating data, simple analysis (e.g., calculating means)	How do I automatically generate a list of files that I want to work with? How can I do the same operations on many different files?

Setup

These instructions assume you’ve already installed the required software for this workshop series (instructions in Introduction and Setup).

If you have not finished the installation requirements, you can write code here: https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/koudyk/blank-python-notebook/HEAD?urlpath=%2Fdoc%2Ftree%2Findex.ipynb

1. Create a project folder where you’ll store data and Python scripts, or find the folder you used in previous workshops in this series.
2. Download this file, put it in your folder, and extract the files in it (you should end up with 9 new csv files in your folder).
3. To open your project in VS Code, open VS code, select File > Open Folder, and open the folder with the data.

Create a local Python environment, if you haven’t in a previous workshop

Skip this step if you created a Python environment for the previous workshop.

Best practice in Python is to create a virtual environment for each project, which contains all the specific libraries (and specific versions) that you need for that project.

We will use the venv tool to create an environment with the following steps:

1. Open the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P
2. Type in Python: Create Environment and click on it
3. Select venv as the tool we want to use to create the environment
4. Select the Python interpreter that you want to use (probably the one with the highest numbers, starting with something like Python 3.10)

After following these steps, VS Code will create a .venv folder in your project folder.

Activate the environment

VS Code may give you a pop-up asking if you want to activate the virtual environment that you just created. If it does, select Yes.

If not, you can run a command in the terminal (in VS Code) to activate it.

For Windows, you should run .venv\Scripts\activate.

For Mac or Linux, you should run source .venv/bin/activate

Install Python libraries

In the terminal in VS Code, you can install the libraries that we will need for this workshop by running the following commands.

First, if you just created your Python environment, you should upgrade pip, which is the tool that we use to install Python libraries.

pip install --upgrade pip

Now we can install the libraries numpy and matplotlib.

pip install numpy matplotlib