coverting list back to string

[Alex Martelli]

Dialtone wrote:

> regnivon at netscape.net (scn) writes:
> 
>> my quest:  i know that output.write(remove) is not correct.  you
>> cannot use the 'write' method on a list.  is there a better way to
>> convert the list to a string after the first element of the list has
>> been removed and then output the strings to a file?  i'm a newbie
>> programmer and need guru help. thank you.
> 
> Sure:
> 
> input = file('c:/python22/programs/linetest.txt', 'r')
> output = file('c:/python22/programs/output.txt', 'w')
> 
> for line in input:
>     remove = line.split()
>     remove = remove[1:]
>     output.write(''.join(remove))

Even better might be to change the last two lines into:

    output.writelines(remove[1:])

(the writelines method accepts ANY sequence of strings, not
just lines).  If the lines are huge, a tiny but neat
optimization can further be (avoiding constructing the
list needed for the slicing):

for line in input:
    fields = iter(line.split())
    fields.next()
    output.writelines(fields)

Note however that all of these solutions remove whitespace
from the file -- including line-ends &c -- since split
splits on whitespace but the whitespace isn't reinserted
afterwards (neither with the explicit join, nor by the
implicit ones performed by the writelines method).  I am
not sure whether this behavior is what the original poster
wants, since I don't have his post on my feed -- it sure
does seem to be what he's asking for, given this partial
quote that I see here, but sometimes what people ask for is
not exactly what they want, so it may be worth double checking.

> input.close()
> output.close()

Leaving these in since they're helpful anyway;-).


Alex