lists and sublists

Question

i use this code to split a data to make a list with three sublists. to split when there is * or -. but it also reads the the \n\n *.. dont know why? i dont want to read those? can some one tell me what im doing wrong? this is the data

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i use this code:

contents = open("data.dat").read()
data = contents.split('*') #split the data at the '*'

newlist = [item.split("-") for item in data if item]

to make that wrong similar to what i have to get list

Answer 1

The "\n\n" is part of the input data, so it's preserved in python. Just add a strip() to remove it:

finallist = [item.strip() for item in newlist]

See the strip() docs: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.strip

UPDATED FROM COMMENT:

finallist = [item.replace("\\n", "\n").strip() for item in newlist]

Answer 2

The following solves your problem i believe:

result = [  [subitem.replace(r'\n\n', '\n') for subitem in item.split('\n-')]
            for item in open('data.txt').read().split('\n*')  ]

# now let's pretty print the result
for i in result:
    print '***', i[0], '***'
    for j in i[1:]:
        print '\t--', j
    print

Note I split on new-line + * or -, in this way it won't split on dashes inside the text. Also i replace the textual character sequence \ n \ n (r'\n\n') with a new line character '\n'. And the one-liner expression is list comprehension, a way to construct lists in one gulp, without multiple .append() or +

Answer 3

This is going to split any asterisk you have in the text as well.

Better implementation would be to do something like:

lines = []

for line in open("data.dat"):
    if line.lstrip.startswith("*"):
        lines.append([line.strip()])  # append a list with your line
    elif line.lstrip.startswith("-"):
        lines[-1].append(line.strip())

For more homework, research what's happening when you use the open() function in this way.

Answer 4

open("data.dat").read() - reads all symbols in file, not only those you want. If you don't need '\n' you can try content.replace("\n",""), or read lines (not whole content), and truncate the last symbol'\n' of each line.