[Tutor] Tab delimited question

[Alan Gauld]

"Ben Ganzfried" <ben.ganzfried at gmail.com> wrote
> def test(infile, outfile):
>  for line in infile:
>            tagIndex = line.find("key")
>            start = tagIndex + 4
>            stop = line[start:].find("\t") -1
>            if tagIndex != -1:
>                print("start is: ", start)
>                print("stop is: ", stop)
>                print("spliced word is ", line[start: stop])
>
> My question is the following: What is wrong w/ the variable 'stop'?
> The index it gives me when I print out 'stop' is not even close to 
> the
> right number.

Some clues would be good - like the programs output?
And its hard to tell where the \t characters are in an email,
so knowing what find is looking at would help too.

> Furthermore, when I try to print out just the word
> following the tag w/ the form: line[start: stop], it prints nothing
> (it seems b/c my stop variable is incorrect).

If stop is wrong that seems likely. Is it possible there is a tab in
there that you didn't expect? Have you tried printing all the
character codes of all whitespace? Or replacing all tabs
with 'TAB' say?


HTH,