Newbie DATA STRUCTURES Question.

Kirby Urner urner at alumni.princeton.edu
Sat Jul 29 00:53:05 EDT 2000


gbp <gpepice1 at nycap.rr.com> wrote:

>
>Hi all,
>
>I have experience with Perl but non with Python.  
>
>I need to write a script to read a large text file into a structured
>format.

Not sure if this is what you mean, but suppose you create 
a text file .\ocn\data.txt:

this is record A
this is record B
this is record C

then you can read it into a list like so:

 >>> myfile = open(r".\ocn\data.txt", 'r')  # see note
 >>> listrecs = myfile.readlines()
 >>> listrecs
 ['this is record A\012', 'this is record B\012', 'this is record C\012']
 >>> myfile.close()

 \012 must be unicode for newline.

 >>> unicode('\n')
 u'\012'

Yep.

Once you have 'listrecs' with all your records, you can
do stuff like:

      for rec in listrecs:
          dostuff(rec)

or    map(dostuff,listrecs)

i.e. you're stepping through the records one record at a time.

Kirby

Note:

in

 >>> myfile = open(r".\ocn\data.txt", 'r')

the leading r, in front of the first quoted string, just
means you don't have to escape the backslashes.  You could
also go:

 >>> myfile = open(".\\ocn\\data.txt", 'r')



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