error in writing to a file - sorting

Question

I have written a python script that calls unix sort using subprocess module. I am trying to sort a table based on two columns(2 and 6). Here is what I have done
sort_bt=open("sort_blast.txt",'w+')
sort_file_cmd="sort -k2,2 -k6,6n {0}".format(tab.name)
subprocess.call(sort_file_cmd,stdout=sort_bt,shell=True)
The output file however contains an incomplete line which produces an error when I parse the table but when I checked the entry in the input file given to sort the line looks perfect. I guess there is some problem when sort tries to write the result to the file specified but I am not sure how to solve it though.
The line looks like this in the input file
gi|191252805|ref|NM_001128633.1| Homo sapiens RIMS binding protein 3C (RIMBP3C), mRNA gnl|BL_ORD_ID|4614 gi|124487059|ref|NP_001074857.1| RIMS-binding protein 2 [Mus musculus] 103 2877 3176 846 941 1.0102e-07 138.0
In output file however only gi|19125 is printed. How do I solve this?
Any help will be appreciated.
Ram

Answer 1

Using subprocess to call an external sorting tool seems quite silly considering that python has a built in method for sorting items.
Looking at your sample data, it appears to be structured data, with a | delimiter. Here's how you could open that file, and iterate over the results in python in a sorted manner:
def custom_sorter(first, second):
""" A Custom Sort function which compares items
based on the value in the 2nd and 6th columns. """
# First, we break the line into a list
first_items, second_items = first.split(u'|'), second.split(u'|') # Split on the pipe character.
if len(first_items) >= 6 and len(second_items) >= 6:
# We have enough items to compare
if (first_items[1], first_items[5]) > (second_items[1], second_items[5]):
return 1
elif (first_items[1], first_items[5]) < (second_items[1], second_items[5]):
return -1
else: # They are the same
return 0 # Order doesn't matter then
else:
return 0
with open(src_file_path, 'r') as src_file:
data = src_file.read() # Read in the src file all at once. Hope the file isn't too big!
with open(dst_sorted_file_path, 'w+') as dst_sorted_file:
for line in sorted(data.splitlines(), cmp = custom_sorter): # Sort the data on the fly
dst_sorted_file.write(line) # Write the line to the dst_file.
FYI, this code may need some jiggling. I didn't test it too well.

Answer 2

What you see is probably the result of trying to write to the file from multiple processes simultaneously.
To emulate: sort -k2,2 -k6,6n ${tabname} > sort_blast.txt command in Python:
from subprocess import check_call
with open("sort_blast.txt",'wb') as output_file:
check_call("sort -k2,2 -k6,6n".split() + [tab.name], stdout=output_file)
You can write it in pure Python e.g., for a small input file:
def custom_key(line):
fields = line.split() # split line on any whitespace
return fields[1], float(fields[5]) # Python uses zero-based indexing
with open(tab.name) as input_file, open("sort_blast.txt", 'w') as output_file:
L = input_file.read().splitlines() # read from the input file
L.sort(key=custom_key) # sort it
output_file.write("\n".join(L)) # write to the output file
If you need to sort a file that does not fit in memory; see Sorting text file by using Python