gov wrote: > Hi, > > I've just started to learn programming and was told this was a good > place to ask questions :) > > Where I work, we receive large quantities of data which is currently > all printed on large, obsolete, dot matrix printers. This is a problem > because the replacement parts will not be available for much longer. > > So I'm trying to create a program which will capture the fixed width > text file data and convert as well as sort the data (there are several > different report types) into a different format which would allow it to > be printed normally, or viewed on a computer.
Are these reports all of the same page-wise format, with fixed-width columns? If so, then the suggestion about a state machine sounds good -- just run a state machine to figure out which linetype you're on, then extract the fixed width fields via slices. name = line[x:y] If that doesn't work, then pyparsing or DParser might work for you as a more general-purpose parser. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
