On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 01:16, Kushal Kumaran <kushal.kumaran+pyt...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Is there any particular reason you absolutely must extract the status > message? If you already have a list of possible status messages, you > could just test which one of those is present in the line...
Yes and no... Mostly, it's for the future. Right now, this particular test script (and I mean test script in the sense it's part of a testing framework, not in the sense that I'm being tested on it ;-) ) is fully automated. Once the self-test on the HDD is complete, the script will return either a 0 or 1 for PASS or FAIL respectively. However, in the future, it may need to be changed to or also handled manually instead of automatically. And if we end up wanting it to be automatic, then having that phrase would be important for logging or problem determination. We don't so much care about the rest of the string I want to parse as the data it gives is mostly meaningless, but having it pull things like: Completed: Electrical error or Completed: Bad Sectors Found could as useful as Completed without error or Aborted by user So that's why I was focusing on just extracting that phrase from the output. I could just pull the entire string and do a search for the phrases in question, and that's probably the simplest thing to do: re.search("Search Phrase",outputString) but I do have a tendency to overthink things some times and besides which, having just that phrase for the logs, or for use in a future change would be cool, and this way, I've already got that much of it done for later on. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list