Help required to read and print lines based on the type of first character

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Abhinayaraj.Raju at Emulex.Com a écrit :

<ot>
Please, don't top-post, and learn to quote & snip
(if you don't know what top-posting is, google is your friend).
</ot>

> Thank you so much for your guidance, Bruno.
> 
> This should help me in a long way.
> 
> Here is the code I have written.
> 
> path = raw_input("\nEnter location eg. c:/buffer/test.txt : \n") 
> fileIN = open(path)

This will break if the file can't be opened (doesn't exist, is 
protected, whatever).

> count = 0

'count' is used locally in the loop, so it shouldn't be set outside it.

> for line in fileIN:
> 	data= line
> 	
> 	if '####' in data:
> 		count = 4
> 	elif '###' in data:
> 		count = 3
> 	elif '##' in data:
> 		count = 2
> 	elif '#' in data:
> 		count = 1
> 	elif data.find('#') == -1:

This test is redundant. if the "'#' in data" evals to False, then 
data.find('#') is garanteed to return -1.

> 		count = 0
> 
> 
> 	if (count == 0 and data!=""):

the file iterator yields lines with the newline character included, so 
there's no way that data == "" (unless you explicitely remove the 
newline character yourself). Read doc for the strip method of string 
objects.

Also, you don't need the parens.

> 		print data + '\nlooks like a code line...\n'
> 	elif(count== 4):
> 		print data + '\ninvalid line!\n'
> 	elif count>=1:
> 		for i in range(0, count):
> 			print data

You didn't address my questions wrt/ specs clarifications. There's a 
*big* difference between *containing* a substring and *starting with* a 
substring. Hint: Python strings have a "startswith" method...

Also and FWIW, since Python >= 2.5.2 (and possibly >= 2.5.0 - I let you 
check the docs), Python's strings have a count method too.

Your code is not too bad for a beginner - I've done worse when I started 
-, but it doesn't really matches the specs (which is impossible FWIW 
given the ambiguities they contain, cf my previous post), and contains a 
couple of more or less useless or redundant tests which make it looks a 
bit like "programming by accident", and doesn't really uses Python's 
string handling features.

HTH