> I guess Duncan's point wasn't the construction of the dictionary but the > throw it away part. If you don't keep it, the loop above is even more > efficient than building a dictionary with *all* lines of the file, just to > pick one value afterwards.
Sure, but I have two options here, none of them nice: either "write C in Python" or do it inefficient and still elaborate way. Anyway, I found my nirvana at last: >>> def shelper(line): ... return x.replace(' ','').strip('\n').split(':',1) ... >>> ownerslist = [ shelper(x)[1] for x in it if len(shelper(x)) == 2 and >>> shelper(x)[0] == domain ] >>> ownerslist ['da2'] Python rulez. :-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list