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@zstumgoren
Created April 9, 2011 17:24
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Read in some data. Skip
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
A simple script showing how to read data from a specified
file, do some basic processing, and then print out processed
lines to the shell. The input file is hard-coded in the text.
USAGE from command line
python simple_file_processing.py
"""
# Use a list comprehension to read in all the lines from your file
data = [line for line in open('/path/to/source_data.txt', 'rb')]
# Skip the first 5 lines using slice notation, and start processing from line 6
# Remember that Python lists are zero-indexed, so the first line is index 0,
# second line is index 1, etc.
for line in data[5:]:
# Strip white space from start and end of line
clean_line = line.strip()
# Do some processing if the line contains text (ie is not a blank line)
if clean_line:
# Remove double-quotes and right parens, replace left parens with dash
# Notice that you can chain your string methods.
processed_line = clean_line.replace('"', '').replace(')','').replace('(','-')
print processed_line
else:
# This will print a blank line to shell
# If you don't want blank lines, you can remove this else clause
print
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