deleting texts between patterns

[Fredrik Lundh]

<micklee74 at hotmail.com> skrev i meddelandet news:1147420279.664699.181200 at i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> hi
> say i have a text file
>
> line1
> line2
> line3
> line4
> line5
> line6
> abc
> line8 <---to be delete
> line9  <---to be delete
> line10  <---to be delete
> line11  <---to be delete
> line12  <---to be delete
> line13 <---to be delete
> xyz
> line15
> line16
> line17
> line18
>
> I wish to delete lines that are in between 'abc' and 'xyz' and print
> the rest of the lines. Which is the best way to do it? Should i get
> everything into a list, get the index of abc and xyz, then pop the
> elements out? or any other better methods?

what's wrong with a simple

    emit = True
    for line in open("q.txt"):
        if line == "xyz\n":
            emit = True
        if emit:
            print line,
        if line == "abc\n":
            emit = False

loop ?  (this is also easy to tweak for cases where you don't want to include
the patterns in the output).

to print to a file instead of stdout, just replace the print line with a f.write call.

</F>