Churn Email: Day of the Week

Python Project – Churn Emails – Find Which Day of the Week the Email was sent

Write a function find_email_sent_days which reads the file /datasets/project/mbox-short.txt and categorizes each mail message by which day of the week the email was sent.

To do this do the following:

  • Open the file and read it line by line
  • Look for lines that start with “From“
  • For those lines which start from “From“, then look for the third word and keep a running count of each of the days of the week. How do you find the day of the week, is an exercise for you.

Note: You have to store the results in a dictionary. Only store those day of the week that exists. For Example, if there is no line for Mon then it should not be in the dictionary elements.

  • At the end of the program return the contents of your dictionary (order does not matter)

Sample Lines from the file:

From stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za Sat Jan  5 10:14:16 2008
From stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za Sat Jan  5 15:14:16 2008
From stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za Sun Jan  6 09:14:16 2008

Output:

{'Sat': 2, 'Sun': 1}

PS – If your logic is correct then your function should return this dictionary {'Sat': 1, 'Fri': 20, 'Thu': 6}.

Code:

def find_email_sent_days():
    with open("/cxldata/datasets/project/mbox-short.txt") as f:
        days = [i.split(' ')[2] for i in f if i.startswith('From ')]
        print (days)
        dic = {}
        for day in days:
            dic[day] = days.count(day)        
        return dic