On 10/06/2007 8:08 PM, flebber wrote: > > Thanks that was so helpful to see how to do it. I have read a lot but > it wasn't sinking in, and sometimes its better to learn by doing.
IMHO it's always better to learn by: read some, try it out, read some, ... > Some > of the books I have read just seem to go from theory to theory with > the occasional example ( which is meant to show us how good the author > is rather than help us). Well, that's the wrong sort of book for learning a language. You need one with little exercises on each page, plus a couple of bigger ones per chapter. It helps to get used to looking things up in the manual. Compare the description in the manual with what's in the book. > > For the record > >>>> ## working on region in file /usr/tmp/python-F_C5sr.py... > ['mimetype', 'maindata.xml'] > File Name > Modified Size > mimetype 2007-05-27 > 20:36:20 17 > maindata.xml 2007-05-27 > 20:36:20 10795 >>>> print len(xml_string) > 10795 >>>> for line in xml_string: > print line > ... ... > < > ? > x > m > l > > v > e > r > s > i.....(etc ...it went for a while) Yup. At a rough guess, I'd say it printed 10795 lines. So now you've learned by doing it what for x in a_string: does :-) I hope you've also learned that "xml_string" was a good name and "line" wasn't quite so good. > > and > >>>> lines = xml_string.splitlines() Have you looked up splitlines in the manual? >>>> print len(lines) > 387 >>>> print len(lines[0]) > 38 >>>> for line in lines: > ... print line > File "<stdin>", line 2 > print line > ^ > IndentationError: expected an indented block >>>> for line in lines: > print line > After you fixed your indentation error, did it look like what you expected to find? Cheers, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list