CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonparsing
user1457123
user1457123

Reputation: 65

Parse Text File by String Position

I have a text file that needs to be split at certain character positions along a line. Ideally I would like to simply insert a comma at a designated position so that I can then load it into an MS Access table (or similar). A line form the text looks like so:

"00ZZ101 Bla Bla BlaBlaBlaBla 022000G0132000R6G00BBDJ1000 091030820514 BlaBla Bla 1PP"

I need to parse the text from 0:4, and 13:29, and 30:32, and 33:34, and so on......

I need the results to essentially be comma delimited so that I can load them into a table. So basically take the first four characters and split them, then the 13th through the 29th and split them, and so forth. The problem in the text file has a carriage return at the end of each line (at the 167th character position). So I need to split each line into multiple pieces based on some rules that determine what data should be grouped together.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4123

Answers (2)

PaulMcG
PaulMcG

Reputation: 63709

From the Python console:

>>> s = "00ZZ101 Bla Bla BlaBlaBlaBla 022000G0132000R6G00BBDJ1000 091030820514 BlaBla Bla 1PP"
>>> slices = [(0,4), (13,29), (30,32), (33,34)]
>>> [s[slice(*slc)] for slc in slices]
['00ZZ', 'la BlaBlaBlaBla ', '22', '0']

If you are reading strings from each line in an input text file, this is the way to read the file and process each line in turn:

with open('xyzzy.txt') as sourcefile:
    for line in sourcefile: 
        # process each line

Upvotes: 6

oDisPo
oDisPo

Reputation: 197

You have:

s = "00ZZ101 Bla Bla BlaBlaBlaBla 022000G0132000R6G00BBDJ1000 091030820514 BlaBla Bla 1PP"

And in python shell

>>> s = "00ZZ101 Bla Bla BlaBlaBlaBla 022000G0132000R6G00BBDJ1000 091030820514 BlaBla Bla 1PP"
>>> s[0:4]
'00ZZ'
>>> s[13:29]
'la BlaBlaBlaBla '
>>> s[30:32]
'22'
>>>

Upvotes: 0

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