[Tutor] Assigning each line of text to a separate variable

[Jeremy Hoon]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Marv Boyes<marvboyes at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm very sorry; I should have been more explicit in what it is I'm working
> with.
>
> The response from the server consists of a pair of hashes and a list of URLs
> for doing different things with the file the hashes represent. So the full
> response is like this:
>
>        file_hash
>        delete_hash
>        http://server.com/file_hash.ext
>        http://server.com/file_hashA.ext
>        http://server.com/file_hashB.ext
>        http://server.com/file_hashC.ext
>        http://server.com/delete/deletehash
>
> I'm hoping to assign each line of that response to a separate variable so I
> can format the output on a case-by-case basis, e.g.:
>
>        direct_link = <third URL in response>
>        print "Direct link to file: %s' % direct_link
>
>        -or-
>
>        delete_file = <seventh URL in response>
>        print "Delete the file: %s' % delete_file
>
> I've got seven lines worth of server response, their order is significant,
> and I need to be able to present each value in an arbitrary way. I won't
> necessarily be presenting these values to the user in the same order they
> come in the server response. Some of the values I'll need to use elsewhere
> in the script to do other things, but it won't be necessary to present those
> values to the user.
>
> I'm not sure I'm even making sense to myself.
>
>
> Kent Johnson wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Marv Boyes<marvboyes at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello, all. This is probably embarrassingly basic, but I haven't been
>>> able
>>> to find something that works.
>>>
>>> I'm working on a script that needs to manipulate a list (not 'list' in
>>> the
>>> Python sense) of URLs returned in a server response. Right now, I'm
>>> stripping the XML tags from that response and assigning the resulting
>>> list
>>> of URLs to a variable so I can print it in the terminal. So when I do,
>>> say,
>>> 'print urls' I get something like this:
>>>
>>>       http://server.com/thing1
>>>       http://server.com/thing2
>>>       http://server.com/thing3
>>>
>>> And so on. What I would _like_ to do is assign each line of that list to
>>> a
>>> separate variable, so that I can format my output to be more explicit;
>>> something like this:
>>>
>>>       Link to Thing1: http://server.com/thing1
>>>       Link to Thing2: http://server.com/thing2
>>
>> It looks like your "list" of URLs is a string containing one URL per
>> line. If you put it in an actual list, you can process it more
>> flexibly. Something like
>>
>> urlList = urls.splitlines()
>> for i, url in enumerate(urlList):
>>  print "Link to Thing%s: %s" % (i, url)
>>
>> Kent
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
>

Hi Marv,

While I'm not convinced hard-coding variables to list items is the
best solution here, you could achieve it with tuple unpacking:

urllist = urls.split()

# urllist should have three items in it, otherwise an exception is raised.
# You will need to adapt this to the length of your list of urls.
link_one,link_two,link_three = urllist

print "the first link:", link_one
print "the second link:", link_two

Best,
Jeremy