I'm reading a file in Python that isn't well formatted, values are separated by multiple spaces and some tabs too so the lists returned has a lot of empty items, how do I remove/avoid those?
This is my current code:
import re
f = open('myfile.txt','r')
for line in f.readlines():
if re.search(r'\bDeposit', line):
print line.split(' ')
f.close()
Thanks
Don't explicitly specify ' ' as the delimiter. line.split() will split on all whitespace. It's equivalent to using re.split:
>>> line = ' a b c \n\tg '
>>> line.split()
['a', 'b', 'c', 'g']
>>> import re
>>> re.split('\s+', line)
['', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'g', '']
>>> re.split('\s+', line.strip())
['a', 'b', 'c', 'g']
line.strip().split()
line.split() will take care of stripping whitespace at the start/end.for line in open("file"):
if " Deposit" in line:
line=line.rstrip()
print line.split()
Update:
for line in open("file"):
if "Deposit" in line:
line=line.rstrip()
print line[line.index("Deposit"):].split()
" Deposit" in line is not equivalent to re.search(r'\bDeposit', line). The latter will match "this,Deposit", while the former won't.linesAsLists = [line.split() for line in open('myfile.txt', 'r') if 'Deposit' in line)]
Why not do line.strip() before handling it? Also, you could use re.split to use a regex like '\s+' as your delimiter.
for line in f.readlines(): line.strip(); continue_processing...SO comments aren't friendly to Python code.
line.split() with no arguments, you get strip for free. ' a b c d '.split() == ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']