[Tutor] find and replace relative to an nearby search string in a file

[A.T.Hofkamp]

Pete O'Connell wrote:
> 
> Write {
>  file /Volumes/raid0/Z353_002_comp_v27.%04d.cin
>  file_type cin
>  name Write1
>  xpos 13762
>  ypos -364
> }

The simplest approach imho is to parse the input with a proper parser, eg PLY 
or pyparsing.

If you want to do the parsing manually, I'd start by classifying each line 
manually to be one of

<empty>
"Write" "{"
<identifier> <argument>
"}"

and then collect the lines of each group to eg a dict (if there are no 
duplicate keys, and order is not relevent).

In both cases, you'll end up with a list of collected groups.

Once you have that, you can do your processing.
Finally, convert the groups back to text.

Albert