IBP banding data system: Internal maintenance specification

This class has only one method, the .readLine() method that must be supplied in classes derived from the BaseStationSet class.

# - - -   M a p s S t a t i o n S e t . r e a d L i n e   - - -

    def readLine(self, scan):
        '''Process one line from the stations authority file.
        '''

In general, we proceed through each field by using the Scan.move() method. This method takes a field length, advances the current scan position that far, and returns the characters scanned. It raises IndexError if the line doesn't have enough characters. See Section 6, “scanFieldList(): A utility routine for flat-file scanning”.

        #-- 1 --
        # [ if the line in scan starts with a sequence of fields
        #   whose names and lengths are specified by
        #   MapsStationSet.FIELD_LIST ->
        #     scan      :=  scan advanced past those fields
        #     fieldSet  :=  values of those fields in the same
        #                   order 
        #   else ->
        #     Log()  +:=  error message
        #     raise IOError ]
        fieldSet = scanFieldList(scan, MapsStationSet.FIELD_LIST)

We unpack fieldSet into individual variables. Then we call the parent class's .addStation() method to take care of adding the new codes to the file. That method can fail, for example if there is a duplicate station code; if so, it will raise IOError.

        #-- 2 --
        region, staNo, locCode, staName, staCode, state = fieldSet

It is necessary to ignore records with a staCode of zero; these represent stations whose numbers have not yet been assigned.

        #-- 3 --
        # [ if staNo is blank or zero ->
        #     return
        #   else -> I ]
        if (staNo.strip()=='') or (int(staNo)==0):
            return

The .rstrip() calls below remove trailing spaces from those fields. See Section 8.5, “BaseStationSet.addStation(): Add a new station”.

        #-- 4 --
        # [ if staNo duplicates a value in self ->
        #     raise IOError
        #   else if locCode is not in self ->
        #     self  :=  self with a new location added as well as
        #         a new station made from (region, staNo,
        #         staName, staCode, and state)
        #   else if locCode is in self ->
        #     self  :=  self with a new station added, made from
        #         (region, staNo, staName, staCode, state) ]
        self.addStation(locCode, staNo, staCode, staName.rstrip())