In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Stephan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>I'm fairly new to python and am working on parsing some delimited text
>files. I noticed that there's a nice CSV reading/writing module
>included in the libraries.
>
>My data files however, are odd in that they are composed of lines with
>alternating formats. (Essentially the rows are a header record and a
>corresponding detail record on the next line. Each line type has a
>different number of fields.)
>
>Can the CSV module be coerced to read two line formats at once or am I
>better off using read and split?
>
>Thanks for your insight,
>Stephan
>
The csv module should be suitable. The reader just takes each line,
parses it, then returns a list of strings. It doesn't matter if
different lines have different numbers of fields.
To get an idea of what I mean, try something like the following
(untested):
import csv
reader = csv.reader(open(filename))
while True:
# Read next "header" line, if there isn't one then exit the
loop
header = reader.next()
if not header: break
# Assume that there is a "detail" line if the preceding
# "header" line exists
detail = reader.next()
# Print the parsed data
print '-' * 40
print "Header (%d fields): %s" % (len(header), header)
print "Detail (%d fields): %s" % (len(detail), detail)
You could wrap this up into a class which returns (header, detail) pairs
and does better error handling, but the above code should illustrate the
basics.
--
Andrew McLean
--
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