Hi Eric,
I tried following and it seems to work:
fullstring = """l1r1 ll1r2 l1r3 l1
r4 l1r5
l2r1 l2r3 l3
r3 l2r4 l2r5
l3r1 l3r2 l3r3 l3r4 l3r5
"""
# This should be a string like your's. "\t"-seperated columns,
"\n"-seperated
# rows, with "\n" in some columns.
rowlength = 5
# for you it would be 9, but I was lazy when I wrote the string
prefetch = ""
lines = []
i = 0
for tab in fullstring.split("\t"):
if i < rowlength-1: #i.e. working on all but the last column
# offtopic: is the last comment correct English?
prefetch += tab + "\t" # +"\t" because split removes the tab
i += 1
else: # last column
prefetch += tab[:tab.find("\n")]
lines.append(prefetch)
prefetch = tab[(tab.find("\n")+2):] #adding the first column without the
"\n"
i = 1 #since we already added the first column
# End
After that "print lines" produces following output:
['l1r1\tll1r2\tl1r3\tl1\nr4\tl1r5', '2r1l2r3\tl3\nr3\tl2r4\tl2r5',
'3r1l3r2\tl3r3\tl3r4\tl3r5']
So you've got a list of the lines. Instead of Strings you could also use
lists, by making prefetch a list and instead of adding the tabs, appending
it.
However, I assumed that the new row is seperated by the first linebreak.
If that's not the case, I think that you have to check for multiple
linebreaks
and if that's true, choose manually which one to select.
Hope this helps,
Marcel
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
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
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_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
