9.10. Parsing lines¶
Usually when we are reading a file we want to do something to the lines other than just printing the whole line. Often we want to find the “interesting lines” and then parse the line to find some interesting part of the line. What if we wanted to print out the day of the week from those lines that start with “From “?
From stephen.marquard@uct.ac.za Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008
The split method is very effective when faced with this
kind of problem. We can write a small program that looks for lines where
the line starts with “From “, split those lines, and then
print out the third word in the line:
Later, we will learn increasingly sophisticated techniques for picking the lines to work on and how we pull those lines apart to find the exact bit of information we are looking for.
Q-2: When reading lines from a file, what list method can be used to select or print parts of a line?
The following code should open a file and read through the lines, splitting them when a line starts with “Hello”, then printing the second word in the line. Watch out for extra pieces of code and indentation.