On 13 Jul 2005 07:49:02 -0700, Michael Jordan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > hey, i have this huge text file and i need to go through and remove all > punctuation and every instance of the phrase "fruitloops=$" where $ is > any number 0-100" um, and yeah this is homework but i've tried to no > avail. thanks guys. cheerio :). jen
Jen, This program iterates through one file and outputs all lines to another file which have the word "homework" in them. #-------------------------- Begin program 1 file_in = file('data.in') file_out = file('data.out') for line in file_in: #line is a string containing one line of the file if "homework" in line: file_out.write("homework") #--------------------------- End program 1 Here is a program which turns a string containing the phrase "number=42" into a variable containing the integer 42: #-------------------------- Begin program 2 #create a string variable called x x = "number=42" #split the string at the '=', resulting in ['number', '42'] n = x.split('=')[1] #turn n from a string into a number, so we could test its value n = int(n) if 0 < n < 100: print "n is between 0 and 100" else: print "n is not between 0 and 100" #-------------------------- End program 2 And, finally, a program to remove punctuation from a string: # ------------------------ Begin program 3 import string #create a sentence with punctuation punct = "This. is a, sentence with - punctuation" #remove the punctuation; make sure the first argument #to maketrans is the same length as the second, which #should be all blanks punct = punct.translate(string.maketrans('.,-', ' ')) #read the docs at # http://docs.python.org/lib/node109.html # for more details #------------------------------------End program 3 Hope this helps; you should be able to put the pieces together to do what you want to do. If you can't, feel free to ask more questions. Also, just so you know, there is a list at tutor@python.org set up just to answer questions like these. Peace Bill Mill [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list