Formatting Results so that They Can be Nicely Imported into a Spreadsheet.

[Jim Langston]

<mensanator at aol.com> wrote in message 
news:1186278638.931477.39760 at z24g2000prh.googlegroups.com...
> On Aug 4, 6:35?pm, SMERSH009 <SMERSH0... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi All.
>> Let's say I have some badly formatted text called doc:
>>
>> doc=
>> """
>> friendid
>> Female
>>
>>                             23 years old
>>
>>                             Los Gatos
>>
>>                             United States
>> friendid
>> Male
>>
>>                             24 years old
>>
>>                             San Francisco, California
>>
>>                             United States
>> """
>>
>> How would I get these results to be displayed in a format similar to:
>> friendid;Female;23 years old;Los Gatos;United States
>> friendid;Male; 24 years old;San Francisco, California;United States
>>
>> The latter is a lot easier to organize and can be quickly imported
>> into Excel's column format.
>>
>> Thanks Much,
>> Sam
>
> d = doc.split('\n')
>
> f = [i.split() for i in d if i]
>
> g = [' '.join(i) for i in f]
>
> rec = []
> temprec = []
> for i in g:
>    if i:
>        if i == 'friendid':
>            rec.append(temprec)
>            temprec = [i]
>        else:
>            temprec.append(i)
> rec.append(temprec)
>
> output = [';'.join(i) for i in rec if i]
>
> for i in output: print i
>
> ##    friendid;Female;23 years old;Los Gatos;United States
> ##    friendid;Male;24 years old;San Francisco, California;United States

also, I would suggest you use CSV format.  CSV stands for "Comma Seperated 
Variable" and Excel can load such a sheet directly.

Instead of seperating using ; seperate using ,  Of course, this provides a 
problem when there is a , in a string.  Resolution is to quote the string. 
Being such, you can just go ahead and quote all strings.  So you would want 
the output to be:

"friendid","Female","23 years old","Los Gatos","United States"
"friendid","Male","24 years old","San Francisco, California","United States"

Numbers should not be quoted if you wish to treat them as numeric and not 
text.