Saint Malo wrote: > BTW my program isn't about red blue yellow etc. I'm just using it as > an example. I guess i didn't asked the question correctly or am not > expressing myself correctly. Let me try one more. > > Ok. > > Contents of text file follow: > > red blue purble > yellow blue green > > > > Now lets imagine i wrote some code to look for the word red. Once the > program has found red i want it to print something like the following > line. > > > If you add red and blue you obtain the color purple... > > > How do i turn each color in the line into a separate string? Now is > that possible? > ... Ok myself!
Let's start at the beginning 1- a text string is text, not colors, right? 2- how does a computer know that you are looking for a color? Because you give it a label say 'red' (which is a text string) and it looks for that pattern of caracters in the string you are giving it as a target. 3- so you already HAVE the string you want, no? So, what I guess you question really is might look like the following: if I find colors words in a line, find what color is produced by the combination of all those I found in the line IF this is the case then what you may want is something like this: mycolors=["red", "green"] for line in file: listofwords = line.split(" ") # is a space is seperating the words in the actual line activecolors=[] # an empty list to use as local container for word in listofwords: if word in mycolors: activecolor.append(word) # keep a note of what color was found in this line dosomething(activecolors) Before I continue with that line of answer, does this seem closer to what you care to do? jm -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list