Reading Files

First we need to import metaknowledge like we saw in lesson 1.

import metaknowledge as mk

we only need metaknowledge for now so no need to import everything

The files from the Web of Science (WOS) can be loaded into a RecordCollections by creating a RecordCollection with the path to the files given to it as a string.

RC = mk.RecordCollection("savedrecs.txt")
repr(RC)

'savedrecs'

You can also read a whole directory, in this case it is reading the current working directory

RC = mk.RecordCollection(".")
repr(RC)

'files-from-.'

metaknowledge can detect if a file is a valid WOS file or not and will read the entire directory and load only those that have the right header. You can also tell it to only read a certain type of file, by using the extension argument.

RC = mk.RecordCollection(".", extension = "txt")
repr(RC)

'txt-files-from-.'

Now you have a RecordCollection composed of all the WOS records in the selected file(s).

print("RC is a " + str(RC))

RC is a Collection of 32 records

You might have noticed I used two different ways to display the RecordCollection. repr(RC) will give you where metaknowledge thinks the collection came from. While str(RC) will give you a nice string containing the number of Records.