[Python Wpg] More on hating brackets, commas, and quotes

[Stuart Williams]

Bill and others,

I mentioned at Tuesday's meeting how to use a regular expression to
split text on indentations to stuff into a nested list.  See below for
how that works - very similar to the code we saw at the meeting.

Hmmm... I wonder how many people will stumble upon this message doing
web searches for the names of the hockey players in the sample data.

Stuart.


import pprint
import re

fan_data = """
Charles
 Daniel Alfredsson
 Pavel Datsyuk
 Mike Modano
 Steve Bernier
Jeff
 Joe Thornton
 Eric Staal
Adam
 Jonathan Cheechoo
 Jere Lehtinen
 Michael Ryder
 Patrick Marleau
"""

fans = []
# strip leading and trailing newline(s) and split on un-indented entries
for para in re.split(r'\n\b', fan_data.strip()):
    lines = para.split('\n')
    # create tuple of first line followed by list of stripped remaining lines
    fans.append((lines[0],
               [player.strip() for player in lines[1:]]))

pprint.pprint(fans)