I have a horribly stupid text parsing problem that is driving me
crazy, and making me think my Python skills have a long, long way to
go...
What I've got is a poorly-though-out SQL dump, in the form of a text
file, where each record is separated by a newline, and each field in
each record is separated by a tab. BUT, and this is what sinks me,
there are also newlines within some of the fields. Newlines are not
'safe' – they could appear anywhere – but tabs are 'safe' – they only
appear as field delimiters.
There are nine fields per record. All I can think to do is read the
file in as a string, then split on tabs. That gives me a list where
every eighth item is a string like this: u'last-field\nfirst-field'.
Now I want to iterate through the list of strings, taking every eighth
item, splitting it on '\n', and replacing it with the two resulting
strings. Then I'll have the proper flat list where every nine list
items constitutes one complete record, and I'm good to go from there.
I've been fooling around with variations on the following (assuming
splitlist = fullstring.split('\t')):
for x in xrange(8, sys.maxint, 8):
try:
splitlist[x:x] = splitlist.pop(x).split('\n')
except IndexError:
break
The first line correctly steps over all the list items that need to be
split, but I can't come up with a line that correctly replaces those
list items with the two strings I want. Either the cycle goes off and
splits the wrong strings, or I get nested list items, which is not
what I want. Can someone please point me in the right direction here?
Thanks,
Eric
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