[Tutor] List Indexing Issue

[Spyros Charonis]

Hello python community,

I'm having a small issue with list indexing. I am extracting certain
information from a PDB (protein information) file and need certain fields
of the file to be copied into a list. The entries look like this:

ATOM   1512  N   VAL A 222       8.544  -7.133  25.697  1.00 48.89
  N
ATOM   1513  CA  VAL A 222       8.251  -6.190  24.619  1.00 48.64
  C
ATOM   1514  C   VAL A 222       9.528  -5.762  23.898  1.00 48.32
  C

I am using the following syntax to parse these lines into a list:

charged_res_coord = [] # store x,y,z of extracted charged resiudes
for line in pdb:
if line.startswith('ATOM'):
atom_coord.append(line)

for i in range(len(atom_coord)):
for item in charged_res:
if item in atom_coord[i]:
charged_res_coord.append(atom_coord[i].split()[1:9])


The problem begins with entries such as the following.

ROW1)   ATOM   1572  NH2 ARG A 228       7.890 -13.328  16.363  1.00 59.63
          N

ROW2)   ATOM   1617  N   GLU A1005      11.906  -2.722   7.994  1.00 44.02
          N

Here, the code that I use to extract the third spatial coordinate (the last
of the three consecutive non-integer values) produces a problem:

because 'A1005' (second row) is considered as a single list entry, while
'A' and '228' (first row) are two list entries, when I
use a loop to index the 7th element it extracts '16.363' (entry I want) for
first row and 1.00 (not entry I want) for the second row.

>>> charged_res_coord[1]
['1572', 'NH2', 'ARG', 'A', '228', '7.890', '-13.328', '16.363']

>>> charged_res_coord[10]
['1617', 'N', 'GLU', 'A1005', '11.906', '-2.722', '7.994', '1.00']


The loop I use goes like this:

for i in range(len(lys_charged_group)):
lys_charged_group[i][7] = float(lys_charged_group[i][7])

The [7] is the problem - in lines that are like ROW1 the code extracts the
correct value,
but in lines that are like ROW2 the code extracts the wrong value.
Unfortunately, the different formats of rows are interspersed
so I don't know if I can solve this using text processing routines? Would I
have to use regular expressions?

Many thanks for your help!

Spyros
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