You are right that my move towards regular expressions was way premature, but also this post may too turn out to be a little premature. I guessed and checked myself a way to accomplish what I needed and I will include it in this post. But first Alex (doesn't have to be Alex) could you tell me if your snipplet and mine would be near perfect subsitutes for one another? I believe they accomplish the same task of looking for 'R0 -' in the list 'lines', however, as you have guessed, I do not know my way around Python very well yet. Here is my snipplet:
log = open('C:\log_0.txt') lines = log.readlines() import re for line in lines: R = re.search(r'^R0', line) if R != None: n = 1 print n import time time.sleep(3) log.close() -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list