Reading files, splitting on a delimiter and newlines.

[Stargaming]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:16:26 -0700, kyosohma wrote:

> On Jul 25, 10:46 am, chris... at gmail.com wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have a situation where I have a file that contains text similar to:
>>
>> myValue1 = contents of value1
>> myValue2 = contents of value2 but
>>                         with a new line here
>> myValue3 = contents of value3
>>
>> My first approach was to open the file, use readlines to split the
>> lines on the "=" delimiter into a key/value pair (to be stored in a
>> dict).
>>
>> After processing a couple files I noticed its possible that a newline
>> can be present in the value as shown in myValue2.
>>
>> In this case its not an option to say remove the newlines if its a
>> "multi line" value as the value data needs to stay intact.
>>
>> I'm a bit confused as how to go about getting this to work.
>>
>> Any suggestions on an approach would be greatly appreciated!
> 
> I'm confused. You don't want the newline to be present, but you can't
> remove it because the data has to stay intact? If you don't want to
> change it, then what's the problem?
> 
> Mike

It's obviously that simple line-by-line filtering won't handle multi-line 
statements.

You could solve that by saving the last item you added something to and, 
if the line currently handles doesn't look like an assignment, append it 
to this item. You might run into problems with such data:

  foo = modern maths
  proved that 1 = 1
  bar = single

If your dataset always has indendation on subsequent lines, you might use 
this. Or if the key's name is always just one word.

HTH,
Stargaming