The following task concerns data that came from a pollution monitoring station with twenty-four instruments monitoring twenty-four aspects of pollution in the air. Periodically a record is added to the file, each record being a line of 49 fields separated by white-space, which can be one or more space or tab characters.

The fields (from the left) are:

 DATESTAMP [ VALUEn FLAGn ] * 24

i.e. a datestamp followed by twenty-four repetitions of a floating-point instrument value and that instrument's associated integer flag. Flag values are >= 1 if the instrument is working and < 1 if there is some problem with it, in which case that instrument's value should be ignored.

A sample from the full data file readings.txt, which is also used in the Text processing/1 task, follows:

Data is no longer available at that link. Zipped mirror available here

1991-03-30	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1
1991-03-31	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	35.000	1	50.000	1	60.000	1	40.000	1	30.000	1	30.000	1	30.000	1	25.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	20.000	1	35.000	1
1991-03-31	40.000	1	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2	0.000	-2
1991-04-01	0.000	-2	13.000	1	16.000	1	21.000	1	24.000	1	22.000	1	20.000	1	18.000	1	29.000	1	44.000	1	50.000	1	43.000	1	38.000	1	27.000	1	27.000	1	24.000	1	23.000	1	18.000	1	12.000	1	13.000	1	14.000	1	15.000	1	13.000	1	10.000	1
1991-04-02	8.000	1	9.000	1	11.000	1	12.000	1	12.000	1	12.000	1	27.000	1	26.000	1	27.000	1	33.000	1	32.000	1	31.000	1	29.000	1	31.000	1	25.000	1	25.000	1	24.000	1	21.000	1	17.000	1	14.000	1	15.000	1	12.000	1	12.000	1	10.000	1
1991-04-03	10.000	1	9.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1	9.000	1	10.000	1	15.000	1	24.000	1	28.000	1	24.000	1	18.000	1	14.000	1	12.000	1	13.000	1	14.000	1	15.000	1	14.000	1	15.000	1	13.000	1	13.000	1	13.000	1	12.000	1	10.000	1	10.000	1

Task

 Confirm the general field format of the file.
 Identify any DATESTAMPs that are duplicated.
 Report the number of records that have good readings for all instruments.


// wrap up the counter variables in a closure.
function analyze_func(filename) {
    var dates_seen = {};
    var format_bad = 0;
    var records_all = 0;
    var records_good = 0;
    return function() {
        var fh = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").openTextFile(filename, 1); // 1 = for reading
        while ( ! fh.atEndOfStream) {
            records_all ++;
            var allOK = true;
            var line = fh.ReadLine();
            var fields = line.split('\t');
            if (fields.length != 49) {
                format_bad ++;
                continue;
            }
 
            var date = fields.shift();
            if (has_property(dates_seen, date)) 
                WScript.echo("duplicate date: " + date);
            else
                dates_seen[date] = 1;
 
            while (fields.length > 0) {
                var value = parseFloat(fields.shift());
                var flag = parseInt(fields.shift(), 10);
                if (isNaN(value) || isNaN(flag)) {
                    format_bad ++;
                }
                else if (flag <= 0) {
                    allOK = false;
                }
            }
            if (allOK)
                records_good ++;
        }
        fh.close();
        WScript.echo("total records: " + records_all);
        WScript.echo("Wrong format: " + format_bad);
        WScript.echo("records with no bad readings: " + records_good);
    }
}
 
function has_property(obj, propname) {
    return typeof(obj[propname]) == "undefined" ? false : true;
}
 
var analyze = analyze_func('readings.txt');
analyze();