Not homework...not even in school (do any universities even teach classes using python?). Just not a programmer. Anyways I should probably be more clear about what I'm trying to do.
Since I cant show the actual output file lets say I had an output file that looked like this: aaaaa bbbbb Person: Jimmy Current Location: Denver Next Location: Chicago ---------------------------------------------- aaaaa bbbbb Person: Sarah Current Location: San Diego Next Location: Miami Next Location: New York ---------------------------------------------- Now I want to put (and all recurrences of "Person: Jimmy") Person: Jimmy Current Location: Denver Next Location: Chicago in a file called jimmy.txt and the same for Sarah in sarah.txt The code I currently have looks something like this: import re import sys person_jimmy = open('jimmy.txt', 'w') #creates jimmy.txt person_sarah = open('sarah.txt', 'w') #creates sarah.txt f = open(sys.argv[1]) #opens output file #loop that goes through all lines and parses specified text for line in f.readlines(): if re.search(r'Person: Jimmy', line): person_jimmy.write(line) elif re.search(r'Person: Sarah', line): person_sarah.write(line) #closes all files person_jimmy.close() person_sarah.close() f.close() However this only would produces output files that look like this: jimmy.txt: aaaaa bbbbb Person: Jimmy sarah.txt: aaaaa bbbbb Person: Sarah My question is what else do I need to add (such as an embedded loop where the if statements are?) so the files look like this aaaaa bbbbb Person: Jimmy Current Location: Denver Next Location: Chicago and aaaaa bbbbb Person: Sarah Current Location: San Diego Next Location: Miami Next Location: New York Basically I need to add statements that after finding that line copy all the lines following it and stopping when it sees '----------------------------------------------' Any help is greatly appreciated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list