Seeking assistance - string processing.

[billpaterson2006 at googlemail.com]

Thanks Fredrik, Peter and John for your help.

John, I especially enjoyed your line by line assasination of my code,
keep it up.

I'm not a programmer, I dislike programming, I'm bad at it. I just
agreed to do this to help someone out, I didn't even know what python
was 3 days ago.

In case you were wondering about all the crazyness with the -------'s -
it's because I am trying to batch convert 1600 files into new versions
with slightly altered syntax.

It all works for now, hurrah, now it's time to break it again.

Cheerio fellas (for now, I'll be back I'm sure ;-D)