Can Python remove double quotes from a string, when reading in text file?

Question

I have some text file like this, with several 5000 lines:

5.6  4.5  6.8  \"6.5\" (new line)
5.4  8.3  1.2  \"9.3\" (new line)

so the last t

Answer 1

Or you can simply replace your line

l = re.split("\s+",string.strip(line)).replace('\"','')

with this:

l = re.split('[\s"]+',string.strip(line))

Answer 2

You can use regexp, try something like this

import re
re.findall("[0-9.]+", file(name).read())

This will give you a list of all numbers in your file as strings without any quotes.

Answer 3

for line in open(name, "r"):
    line = line.replace('"', '').strip()
    a, b, c, d = map(float, line.split())

This is kind of bare-bones, and will raise exceptions if (for example) there aren't four values on the line, etc.

Answer 4

There's a module you can use from the standard library called shlex:

>>> import shlex
>>> print shlex.split('5.6  4.5  6.8  "6.5"')
['5.6', '4.5', '6.8', '6.5']

Answer 5

The csv module (standard library) does it automatically, although the docs isn't very specific about skipinitialspace

>>> import csv

>>> with open(name, 'rb') as f:
...     for row in csv.reader(f, delimiter=' ', skipinitialspace=True):
...             print '|'.join(row)

5.6|4.5|6.8|6.5
5.4|8.3|1.2|9.3

Answer 6

I think the easiest and most efficient thing to do would be to slice it!

From your code:

d = l[3]
returns "6.5"

so you simply add another statement:

d = d[1:-1]

now it will return 6.5 without the leading and end double quotes.

viola! :)