On 9/19/07, Carsten Haese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > , then looking for id 12 is going to match on the wrong ID. Besides, > that code only tells you where something that looks like the ID you're > looking for is in the file. There is no guarantee that the match > actually occurs inside an ID attribute. It also doesn't help in > retrieving the text contents of the <str> tag that has this ID. > > If your input is an XML file, using an actual XML parser is the only > correct solution.
You're perfectly right. The code example was purposedly incomplete for this very reason. It could be made less sensitive to false matches by constructing a correct substring, something like pattern = '<str id = ' + stringID + '>' and then in the loop: line.find(pattern) but I agree that it would be wrong to proceed this way. The motivation of my reply was more to suggest a better way to iterate over a file than else... but since I've been confusing it probably would have been better to avoid. francesco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
