On Sunday 06 January 2008 21:25 Francesco Pietra wrote: >> yes lines starting with a "#" are comments in python but that shouldn't >> be of concern for your input data. I don't quite get what you want >> here... > > Leaving the lines commented out would permit to resume them or at least > remeber what was suppressed. During trial and error set up of a > calculation one never knows exactly the outcome
Ah I get it. To clarify: The character python uses as a comment has nothing to do with the character your data file uses as a comment. So you could of course use the "#" sign (which makes sense) You could also use "//" (C-Style) or whatever you like class CommentHelper(object): """Provides the necessary methods to comment or uncomment a line of text. """ # Yes I know this docstring is badly formatted but # I thought it's nicer to keep the indentation. def __init__(self, commentStr=None): if commentStr: self.commentStr = commentStr else: self.commentStr = "MY_SUPER_COMMENT_STRING" def commentLine(line): """Comments a line with the initialized comment string. """ return self.commentStr + " " + line def uncommentLine(line): """Uncomments a line iff it is preceded by the comment string. """ if line.startsWith(self.commentStr): return line[len(self.commentStr)].lstrip() raise Exception("Can't uncomment Line with no comment") You want to read up about: * (new style) classes * parameters with default values * docstrings * Exceptions That code is untested and may contain errors. I'll let the debugging be your task :) hope it points you to the right topics to read up about: http://docs.python.org/ http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html http://www.diveintopython.org/ martin -- http://noneisyours.marcher.name http://feeds.feedburner.com/NoneIsYours -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list