Storing records from a parsed file

[Ben]

Apologies if this is te wrong place to post -  I realise the question
is pretty basic...

I have a simple python script that parses a text file and extracts data
from it. Currently
this data is stored in a list by  a function, each element of which is
an instance of a class with
member variables to take the data. So for example I have:

camera_list.append(camera(alpha,beta,gamma....))

where

class camera:
     def __init__(self,name,site,address,text):
         self.name=name
         self.site=site
         self.address=address
         self.text=text

Every time I append an item to this list I pass in the constructor
parameters so end up with all my data in the list which can then be
accessed by doing myList[x].name (for example)

This seemed like  a nice solution until I tried to put the entire
parsing program into its own class. I did this so that I could parse
different types of file:

thistype.getdata()
thattype.getdata()
...
thisfile and thatfile would have the same function definitions, but
different implementations as needed.

But now my list generating funtion needs to create inner "camera"
classes when it is itself a member funcition of a class. This seems to
be causing problems - I coudl possibly use nested dictionaries, but
this sounds messy. Ideally I would use structs defined inside the
outer class, but pythn doesn't seem to support these.

I hope I haven't rambled too much here - I'm new to python so have
probably done some silly things :-)

Cheers,

Ben