Python Equivalent for dd & fold

[MRAB]

seldan24 wrote:
> On Jul 15, 1:48 pm, Emile van Sebille <em... at fenx.com> wrote:
>> On 7/15/2009 10:23 AM MRAB said...
>>
>>>> On Jul 15, 12:47 pm, Michiel Overtoom <mot... at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>>> seldan24 wrote:
>>>>>> what can I use as the equivalent for the Unix 'fold' command?
>>>>> def fold(s,len):
>>>>>      while s:
>>>>>          print s[:len]
>>>>>          s=s[len:]
>> <snip>
>>> You might still need to tweak the above code as regards how line endings
>>> are handled.
>> You might also want to tweak it if the strings are _really_ long to
>> simply slice out the substrings as opposed to reassigning the balance to
>> a newly created s on each iteration.
>>
>> Emile
> 
> Thanks for all of the help.  I'm almost there.  I have it working now,
> but the 'fold' piece is very slow.  When I use the 'fold' command in
> shell it is almost instantaneous.  I was able to do the EBCDIC->ASCII
> conversion usng the decode method in the built-in str type.  I didn't
> have to import the codecs module.  I just decoded the data to cp037
> which works fine.
> 
> So now, I'm left with a large file, consisting of one extremely long
> line of ASCII data that needs to be sliced up into 35 character
> lines.  I did the following, which works but takes a very long time:
> 
> f = open(ascii_file, 'w')
> while ascii_data:
>     f.write(ascii_data[:len])
>     ascii_data = ascii_data[len:]
> f.close()
> 
The 'write' method doesn't append any line ending, so that code gives
the same output as f.write(ascii_data).

> I know that Emile suggested that I can slice out the substrings rather
> than do the gradual trimming of the string variable as is being done
> by moving around the length.  So, I'm going to give that a try... I'm
> a bit confused by what that means, am guessing that slice can break up
> a string based on characters; will research.  Thanks for the help thus
> far.  I'll post again when all is working fine.