A Bug in the code :(

When I got back from the club, I decided to add to the per competitor information a list of the zones worked, to compliment the list of large squares worked. I was surprised to find that some people has zone 14 listed twice. Zone 14 is by far the most common zone so it would be the one most likely to show a problem.

In my code I was encoding the zone as a string rather than a number. There were reasons why this made sense in the early evolution of the code. However this meant that the code was sensitive to the *exact* text in file observers.txt., including the presence of spaces. What I had thought I had done, but regrettable has not done correctly, was to strip the white space out making the code whitespace insensitive. However the way that I had written the code made any observer entry with different whitespace to the others in that zone appear to the program to be a different zone. The same error applied to entities (countries).

For example:

G3XYZ, 14, 223
and
G3ABC,  14,  223

would look like two different zones and BTW two different entities due to the white space error in the file observers.txt.

This may account for why the results changed when I needed to recreate a large part of the observers.txt file a few days ago, and why there may have been some day to day changes as I edited the file to add new observers.

For those interested I ran the following code on the observers file:

of = open(‘observers.txt’, ‘r’)
for o in of:
   od = o.split(‘,’)
   if str(int(od[1].rstrip()))==’14’ and od[1].rstrip()!=’ 14′:
      print “The old method”
      print o
      print “Try the new method”
      if str(int(od[1].rstrip())) == ’14’:
         print “New method works”
      else:
         print “New method also fails”
      print “=========”

and I got the following result:

The old method
PH0WAW,  14, 263

Try the new method
New method works
=========
The old method
PH2LB,  14, 263

Try the new method
New method works

=========

Thus anyone who worked either of these stations would have got a double credit for zone 14.
I randomly tested zone 5 and found one entry in error.

The code “str(int(od[1].rstrip())” is a clumsy but robust  way of dealing with the problem, so hopefully that is one more problem removed from the code. Of course I also corrected the same problem in reading the country column in the observers.txt file.

The code and the observers.txt file are viewable by anyone and any review of the work is appreciated.

The overall effect on the scores I published this morning can be seen by comparing the new result:

Posn    Member  CQscore MHscore

1       GX3WSC  5664    11564
2       M0WID   2934    5705
3       G3RMK   2448    4590
4       G3YSX   2370    4740
5       M0TZZ   2304    4176
6       G3NZP   793     1464
7       G4PEO   700     1400
8       G0KCH   546     1092
9       G4FYY   456     1140
10      G4ANN   320     704
11      G4PFW   204     408
12      M0HQM   138     345
13      G3VJM   96      192
14      G7OBF   22      44
15      VK6PG   12      18

with the result I published this morning:

Posn    Member  CQscore MHscore

1       GX3WSC  6399    11613
2       M0WID   3116    5740
3       G3RMK   2601    4590
4       G3YSX   2544    4770
5       M0TZZ   2448    4176
6       G3NZP   854     1464
7       G4PEO   700     1400
8       G0KCH   624     1092
9       G4FYY   456     1140
10      G4ANN   320     704
11      G4PFW   204     408
12      M0HQM   138     345
13      G3VJM   120     192
14      G7OBF   22      44
15      VK6PG   12      18

Thus most people have lost points, but the relative positions are unchanged.

73

Stewart/G3YSX