Writing different sections into a file

[justin walters]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 3:04 AM, Karim <kliateni at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 25/04/2016 09:30, Palpandi wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I need to write different sections into a file.
>> At any point of time, content can be added to any section.
>>
>> I don't want keep each section into a temporary file.
>> What is the better way to store the contents of each section and write
>> them into a file at the end?
>> What is the better datatype to achieve this?
>>
>>
>> Thanks and Regards,
>> Palpandi
>>
>
> Use Stringio:
> -
>
> from cStringIO import StringIO
>
> content = StringIO()
>
> # Header
> content.write('; Header\n')
> content.write('; Body'\n)
> content.write('; Footer\n')
>
> open('my_file', 'wb').write(content.getvalue())
>
> -
> Karim
>
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>


All of the other answers are great too. I was thinking that you could
format the text file to have dividers for each section. For instance it may
look something like this:

Header
Lorem ipsum....
<--->
Body
Lorem ipsum...
<--->
Footer
Lorem ipsum..

Then, you could create a list of sections like so:

file = open('file.txt', 'r').read()

section_list = file.split('<--->')

print(section_list[0])

>>>
Header
Lorem ipsum...

Say you wanted to get really fancy, you could even format the file to have
named sections like so:

<section name="Header">
    <content>Lorem ipsum...</content>
</section>
<section name="Body">
    <content>Lorem ipsum...</content>
</section>
<section name="footer">
    <content>Lorem ipsum...</content>
</section>

Then you can use the xmlparser library to parse the file into an xml object.


Alternatively, you could also use JSON formatting:

{
    sections: {
        header: {
            title: "header",
            content: "Lorem ipsum..."
        },
        body: {
            title: "Body",
            content: "Lorem ipsum..."
        },
        footer: {
            title: "Footer",
            content: "Lorem ipsum..."
        }
    }
}

I hope this helps.