Esmail wrote: > Hello David, > > R. David Murray wrote: >> Esmail <ebo...@hotmail.com> wrote: >> >> Here's a more Pythonic way to do that: >> >> with open('somefile') as f: >> for line in f: >> if 'somestring' in line: >> #do something >> >> In other words, you don't have to read the lines into a list first if all >> you are going to do is iterate through them. > > Cool .. stored away for future reference. > > In this case I believe I needed the contents in a list because the line > I was looking for was above one that I could easily identify. Ie, once > I had the index, I could go back/up one index to find the line I needed > to process.
Here's one way to avoid the list: last_line = None for line in f: if "somestring" in line and last_line is not None: # do something with last_line last_line = line Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list