[Tutor] Loops

[pa yo]

I need some help.

I have written a filter called Peqibot that takes posts from Twitter
and makes them into wikipages on peqipedia.com

So if you post the following message on Twitter:

>@peqi Tallinn=The capital city of [[Estonia]].

It makes a page on peqipedia.com with "Tallinn" as the headline and
with the article text being "The captial city of [[Estonia]]."

... it seems to be working ok - but I discovered that if someone posts
a message starting with "@peqi" but without an "=" sign the program
crashes.

The way I have come up with to solve this problem is to put the
following loop in:

>> rawfeed = feedparser(http//twitter.com/foobar....)

>> feedstring = rawfeed.split('=',1)        #this splits the feed at the first "="

>> headline = feedstring[0]                    #this is the text infront of the "=" sign.

>> if len(headlinestring) == len(rawfeed)    #ie. if the split hasn't worked they will be exactly the same length

>>     body = "\x7b\x7bEmpty\x7d\x7d"        #this adds an "{{Empty}}" template to the wiki

>> else:

>>     body = feedstring[1]

>> #....here I use urllib to encode a post from headline and body that can be posted to the wiki.

But I can't get it to work - I have tried various indents and break
and continues - but I don't know enough about loops to identify what I
have done wrong.

Any advice or suggestions would be great. (it's my first program so
there might well be a better way to avoid this problem in the first
place).

Best wishes

Payo