[Tutor] Reading only a few specific lines of a file

[Alan Gauld]

"Marilyn Davis" <marilyn at deliberate.com> wrote

> (I'm sorry for the duplicate, Alan.)

I didn't see a duplicate! ;-)

>> linecount = 0
>> for line in file("itemconfig.txt", 'rU'):
>>     if line == objectToLoad or linecount > 0:
>>         if linecount == 0: linecount = 5
>>         itemList.append(line.split()[:5])
>>         linecount -= 1
>
> I always go for readability.  So I like "for x in range(5):" to go 5
> times.  I'm not sure what we should be doing 5 times either.

You could use a nested for loop but that would involve the use
of an iterator.next() function which I didn't want to confuse
the issue with, although John has pointed it out now anyway.
Since the outer for loop is doing the next() call for us it didn't
seem necessary.

> Similarly, for readability, I choose the if/elif/else form of switch
> replacement.

Are you referring to the other thread?
There is no switch here.

> Also, I don't like to see the obfuscated forms of the conditional
> operator.  Heck, I'm not even crazy about the Python conditional in 
> 2.5.

Similarly there is no conditional statements here? Again are
you refering to the other recent thread?

> I like to say "The point of a programming language is to communicate 
> with
> other engineers (in a language that also the computer understands)."

I agree. :-)

Alan G.