Hey, all; The print suggestion was the key clue. Turned out my loop was slurping the whole of data in one big line. Searching for a line that begins with Name when it's in the middle of the string is... obviously not going to work so well.
Took me a bit to get that working and, once I did, I realized I was on the wrong track altogether. In perl, if possible, I will read a file entirely as manipulation of one large data structure is easier in some ways. Even with perl, though, that approach is the wrong one for this data. While I learned lots, the key lesson is forcing data to match an algorithm works as well in python as it does in perl. Go figure. My 200+ script that didn't work so well is now 63 lines, including comments... and works perfectly. Outstanding! Thanks for putting up with noob questions Doug -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
