Slicing every element of a list

[Scott David Daniels]

Alex Dempsey wrote:
> Recently I tried to slice every element of a list of strings. First I tried:
> 
> f = open("export.xls", "r")
> lines = f.readlines()
> 
> for line in lines:
>     line = line[1:-5]
>     line = line.split('\"\t\"')
> 
> This went without returning any errors, but nothing was sliced or
> split. Next I tried:
> 
> for i in range(len(lines)):
>     lines[i] = lines[i][1:-5]
>     lines[i] = lines[i].split('\"\t\"')
> 
> This of course worked, but why didn't the first one work. Further why
> didn't the first one return an error?

result = [line[1 : -5].split('\"\t\"') for line in lines]

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org