Extract specific lines from file and create sections of data in python

Question

Trying to write a python script to extract lines from a file. The file is a text file which is a dump of python suds output.

I want to:

1. strip all charac

Answer 1

Several suggestions on your code:

Stripping all non-alphanumeric characters is totally unnecessary and timewasting; there is no need whatsoever to build linelist. Are you aware you can simply use plain old string.find("ArrayOf_xsd_string") or re.search(...)?

1. strip all characters except words and numbers. I don't want any "\n", "[", "]", "{", "=", etc characters.
2. find a section where it starts with "ArrayOf_xsd_string"
3. remove the next line "item[] =" from the result

Then as to your regex, _ is already covered under \W anyway. But the following reassignment to line overwrites the line you just read??

for line in f:
  line = re.compile('[\W_]+') # overwrites the line you just read??
  line.sub('', string.printable)

Here's my version, which reads the file directly, and also handles multiple matches:

with open('data.txt', 'r') as f:
    theDict = {}
    found = -1
    for (lineno,line) in enumerate(f):
        if found < 0:
            if line.find('ArrayOf_xsd_string')>=0:
                found = lineno
                entries = []
            continue
        # Grab following 6 lines...
        if 2 <= (lineno-found) <= 6+1:
            entry = line.strip(' ""{}[]=:,')
            entries.append(entry)
        #then create a dict with the key from line 5
        if (lineno-found) == 6+1:
            key = entries.pop(4)
            theDict[key] = entries
            print key, ','.join(entries) # comma-separated, no quotes
            #break # if you want to end on first match
            found = -1 # to process multiple matches

And the output is exactly what you wanted (that's what ','.join(entries) was for):

123456 001,ABCD,1234,wordy type stuff,more stuff, etc
234567 002,ABCD,1234,wordy type stuff,more stuff, etc
345678 003,ABCD,1234,wordy type stuff,more stuff, etc