In the previous post, I explained how I recently had to sort through PubMed references to extract email addresses. As part of the tutorial, I had you download a sample text file containing 14 references, and we read the content of this file in Python. We are now going to continue cleaning the references to have them in a standardized
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My colleagues and I recently needed to identify all the PubMed references on a given topic and locate email addresses of the corresponding authors. The good news is that the Author information section of PubMed references contains one or more email addresses approximately half of the time. This meant that I could automate the extraction of these email addresses by
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We had a short intro to functions and understand that a function works with variables defined inside or outside it. Now, let’s write a function to help with data analysis. I needed to analyse data from 3 people who had a stroke. The way these data are structured can be typical of experimental studies (on humans): each subject has a
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We last saw how to write a function in Python. Let’s take a step back to consider how a function works with variables provided to it. Functions can accept input values and return new values. In Python, input values are passed into the function using local variables inserted in the parentheses (). For example, the fahr_to_kelvin() function below receives the
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A function is a named block of code that is used to perform computations. Python provides many in-built functions such as print() and zip(), but functions can also be created by users. Why create functions? Functions provide a way to package code so it is easy to reuse when the same action needs to be performed repeatedly. This means there
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Python has a number of in-built data structures. Two of the most common structures are lists and dictionaries. In Python, a list is a sequence of values and is constructed with square brackets, e.g. [1, 5, ‘abc’, 34.8]. The values in a list can be numbers or strings. A dictionary is a sequence of keys associated with values and is
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Scientifically Sound 