On Jan 23, 2:53 pm, John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 24, 6:17 am, ryan k <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I am taking a database class so I'm not asking for specific answers. > > Well I have this text tile: > > >http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/115/projects/proj0/customer.txt > > Uh-huh, "column-aligned" output. > > > > > And this code: > > [snip] > > > > > Because the addresses contain spaces, this won't work because there > > are too many values being unpacked in row's __init__'s for loop. Any > > suggestions for a better way to parse this file? > > Tedious (and dumb) way: > field0 = line[start0:end0+1].rstrip() > field1 = line[start1:end1+1].rstrip() > etc > > Why dumb: if the column sizes change, you have to suffer the tedium > again. While your sample appears to pad out each field to some > predetermined width, some reporting software (e.g. the Query Analyzer > that comes with MS SQL Server) will tailor the widths to the maximum > size actually observed in the data in each run of the report ... so > you write your program based on some tiny test output and next day you > run it for real and there's a customer whose name is Marmaduke > Rubberduckovitch-Featherstonehaugh or somesuch and your name is mud. > > Smart way: note that the second line (the one with all the dashes) > gives you all the information you need to build lists of start and end > positions.
Thank you for your detailed response Mr. Machin. The teacher *said* that the columns were supposed to be tab delimited but they aren't. So yea i will just have to count dashes. Thank you! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
