[Tutor] Tab delimited question

[Joel Goldstick]

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Ben Ganzfried <ben.ganzfried at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm searching line by line for certain tags and then printing the tag
> followed by the word immediately following the tag.
>
> So for example, suppose I had the following line of text in a file:
>


> mystring = "this   is      a       key     test123 noise    noise  noise
> noise   noise"
>

you can get the words in a list with

mylist = mystring.split()

You can get the index of 'key' with

mylist.index('key')

So the next value is the one you want


Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:09:56)
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = "this   is      a       key     test123 noise    noise  noise
noise   noise"
>>> a = s.split()
>>> a
['this', 'is', 'a', 'key', 'test123', 'noise', 'noise', 'noise', 'noise',
'noise']
>>> a.index('key')
3
>>> mystuff = a[a.index('key') + 1]
>>> mystuff
'test123'
>>>



>
> In this example, I would want to print "key test123" to a new file.
> The rest of the words I would not want.
>
> Here is my code so far:
>
> 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.  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).
>
> I would greatly appreciate any help you have.  This is a much
> simplified example from the script I'm actually writing, but I need to
> figure out a way to eliminate the noise after the key and the word
> immediately following it are found.
>
> Thank you very much for any help you can provide.
>
> Ben
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-- 
Joel Goldstick
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