Seeking assistance - string processing.

[John Machin]

billpaterson2006 at googlemail.com wrote:
> Thanks Fredrik, Peter and John for your help.
>
> John, I especially enjoyed your line by line assasination of my code,
> keep it up.
>
> I'm not a programmer, I dislike programming, I'm bad at it. I just
> agreed to do this to help someone out, I didn't even know what python
> was 3 days ago.
>

I would have to disagree strongly with the "I'm bad at it". Everything
is relative. I've seen mind-bogglingly fugly incoherent messes produced
by people who claim to be professional programmers with 3 *years*
experience in a language (only rarely in Python). To have produced what
you did -- it was clear enough what you were trying to do, and it
"worked" well enough for a one-off job -- with 3 *days* experience with
Python was a remarkable achievement IMHO.

What's this "dislike programming" business? No such concept :-)

Cheers,
John