Adding spaces within a string in Python?

Question

I'm relatively new to Python (using v2.7.3) and I decided to test my skills out with editing a text document comprised of all the texts I've received on my phone. I want to edit out the useless information so I wrote a script to do that, but all the spaces between words are being deleted.

Here's a sample of the input data:

sms protocol="932" address="XXXXXXXXXX" date="1305655717379" type="1" subject="null" body="Talk to joey?" toa="null" sc_toa="null" service_center="null" read="1" status="-1" locked="0" date_sent="null" readable_date="May 17, 2011 2:08:37 PM" contact_name="David XXXX" />

Here's a sample of the output data:

body="Talktojoey?"toa="null"sc_toa="null"service_center="null"read="1"status="-1"locked="0"date_sent="null"readable_date="May17,20112:08:37PM"contact_name="DavidXXXX/>

Here's my code:

line= textfile.readline() 
for line in textfile:

    line = line.strip() 
    line = line.split(' ')     
    del line[0:6]
    line.append("\n")
    print line
    output.writelines(line)

textfile.close()

output.close()

Any help on how to add spaces would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

@Hiroto: Not bad advice, but how is it relevant to his problem? — abarnert
– abarnert, Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 19:37
@abarnet it isn't, but i was just nitpicking, and he says he's new to python, which is why it's a comment. — Amelia
– Amelia, Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 19:42
@Hiroto: But without explaining what the difference is, or why he should care, I'm not sure it's very useful. — abarnert
– abarnert, Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 19:44

Alex · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-19 19:48:55Z

2

If you look closely at your line of data you will see that it is a fragment of xml that is missing the leading '<'. If you add the '<' you will now have an 'sms' xml element.

>>> input = '<sms protocol="932" address="XXXXXXXXXX" date="1305655717379" type="1" subject="null" body="Talk to joey?" toa="null" sc_toa="null" service_center="null" read="1" status="-1" locked="0" date_sent="null" readable_date="May 17, 2011 2:08:37 PM" contact_name="David XXXX" />'

Now we can process this with something like ElementTree.

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> element = ET.fromstring(input)

Now you can access the tag's attributes as a friendly dictionary.

>>> element.attrib 
{'body': 'Talk to joey?', 'service_center': 'null', 'protocol': '932', 'read': '1', 'sc_toa': 'null', 'readable_date': 'May 17, 2011 2:08:37 PM', 'date': '1305655717379', 'status': '-1', 'address': 'XXXXXXXXXX', 'date_sent': 'null', 'locked': '0', 'contact_name': 'David XXXX', 'toa': 'null', 'type': '1', 'subject': 'null'}

answered Feb 19, 2013 at 19:48

Alex

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1 Comment

Rob M Over a year ago

Thanks, I didn't think to check if there were xml functions in Python. That's something I'll be sure to do in the future. Thanks again.

Amber · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-20 00:05:37Z

1

This bit...

line = line.split(' ')

removes the spaces when it splits it into pieces. You'll need to add them back in:

line = line.split(' ')     
del line[0:6]
line = ' '.join(line)
line += "\n"
print line,
output.write(line)

edited Feb 20, 2013 at 0:05

answered Feb 19, 2013 at 19:30

Amber

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1 Comment

abarnert Over a year ago

This isn't going to work. For one thing, you'll get an AttributeError on that line.append.

abarnert · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-19 19:41:48Z

0

The problem here is that you're calling output.writelines(line).

I'm not sure what you expect that to do when given a list of strings, but you can't have expected to print them out as words with spaces in between. Those words aren't separate lines, and you don't want them that way.

So, how do you join a list of words into a single string, with spaces separating the words? Using the join method:

' '.join(line)

And then, instead of using writelines (which expects multiple lines), just use write:

output.write(' '.join(line))

See the tutorial on Input and Output for the differences between write and writelines (and other things).

answered Feb 19, 2013 at 19:41

abarnert

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1 Comment

Rob M Over a year ago

Thanks for the help. I tried using output.write first, but it resulted in a buffer error. For whatever reason output.writelines did not result in an error so I ran with it. Your suggestion worked like a charm, I appreciate it.

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