INST 326 Module 13

The National UFO Reporting Database has an index of UFO sightings. Your task is to create a python script that extracts the location for each sighting in the database and creates a tally of sightings by city.

We don’t want to abuse the UFO Databases’s servers, so we have a local version of some of the data that you should use for this assignment. Here is a page you can access as often as you want. This mimics the Events by Date listing:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/INST326/ndxLocOut.html

And it links to two months worth of data

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/INST326/ndxe201903.html

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/INST326/ndxe201902.html

The format of those sample pages is the same as on the database website.

Many cities will appear multiple times. You do not want to list the cities over and over. Instead, store them in an object. You should create a class UFO that has variables for at least city, state, and number of reports. As you read in records, keep track of how many reports there are for each city. You will likely need a data structure to connect city and state names to your objects. When you get a new report for a city/state, increment the variable that tracks the number of reports.

At the end of this step, you should have a bunch of objects with cities and states (or city,province or city,country if you use international locations) where there were sightings and a count of each time that city appeared. Create an output file that has that data. Use a tab to separate the city and the count. Your output file should look like this:

Deliverable: A python script that outputs a file the processes the sample data linked above. The output file should contain one city/state (or city,province or city,country if you use international locations) with the corresponding count on each line.