Reading files, splitting on a delimiter and newlines.

[attn.steven.kuo at gmail.com]

On Jul 25, 8:46 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!



Check the length of the list returned from split; this allows
your to append to the previously extracted value if need be.

import StringIO
import pprint

buf = """\
myValue1 = contents of value1
myValue2 = contents of value2 but
                   with a new line here
myValue3 = contents of value3
"""

mockfile = StringIO.StringIO(buf)

record=dict()

for line in mockfile:
    kvpair = line.split('=', 2)
    if len(kvpair) == 2:
        key, value = kvpair
        record[key] = value
    else:
        record[key] += line

pprint.pprint(record)

# lstrip() to remove newlines if needed ...

--
Hope this helps,
Steven