how to extract columns like awk $1 $5

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 01:15, Anand S Bisen wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Is there a simple way to extract words speerated by a space in python 
> the way i do it in awk '{print $4 $5}' . I am sure there should be some 
> but i dont know it.

The 'str.split' method is probably what you want:

.>>> x = "The confused frog mumbled something about foxes"
.>>> x.split()
['The', 'confused', 'frog', 'mumbled', 'something', 'about', 'foxes']
.>>> x.split(" ")[4:6]
['something', 'about']

so if 'x' is your string, the rough equivalent of that awk statement is:

.>>> x_words = x.split()
.>>> print x_words[4], x_words[5]

or perhaps

.>>> print "%s %s" % tuple(x.split()[4:6])

--
Craig Ringer