python string manipulation

Question

Going to re-word the question.

Basically I'm wondering what is the easiest way to manipulate a string formatted like this:

Safety/Report/Image/489

or

Safety/Report/Image/490

And sectioning off each word seperated by a slash(/), and storing each section(token) into a store so I can call it later. (Reading in about 1200 cells from a CSV file).

This seems more like a job for XML than CSV. You might want to look at this module. Or, depending on what operations you are planning on doing, go with SQLite. — Björn Pollex
– Björn Pollex, Commented Jul 29, 2011 at 11:58
"ending up with something like this"? What kind of data structure? A new CSV file? A dictionary of dictionaries? A JSON object? What input and what output formats do you have? — S.Lott
– S.Lott, Commented Jul 29, 2011 at 12:12
@Mike: (1) Status Comments ("Edited post slightly") aren't helpful. Please don't add them. Please remove the one that's there. (2) You still haven't provided a very useful example. No one can write a unit test from the information provided. (3) Clearly, you have some Python code in mind. Please include either the code you've got, or perhaps some pseudo-code to show what you're talking about. — S.Lott
– S.Lott, Commented Jul 29, 2011 at 12:27
the reason for not adding such things before, was because i just wanted to be pointed in the right direction to some sort of string manipulation possible in python for me to seperate the sections of the ID into 'tokens' and use them to populate the new rows i want to add — Michael
– Michael, Commented Jul 29, 2011 at 12:42

joaquin · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-29 13:50:21Z

3

The answer for your question:

>>> mystring = "Safety/Report/Image/489"
>>> mystore = mystring.split('/')
>>> mystore
['Safety', 'Report', 'Image', '489']
>>> mystore[2]
'Image'
>>>

If you want to store data from more than one string, then you have several options depending on how do you want to organize it. For example:

liststring = ["Safety/Report/Image/489",
              "Safety/Report/Image/490",
              "Safety/Report/Image/491"]

dictstore = {}            
for line, string in enumerate(liststring):
    dictstore[line] = string.split('/')

print dictstore[1][3]
print dictstore[2][3]

prints:
490
491

In this case you can use in the same way a dictionary or a list (a list of lists) for storage. In case each string has a especial identifier (one better than the line number), then the dictionary is the option to choose.

edited Jul 29, 2011 at 13:50

answered Jul 29, 2011 at 13:40

joaquin

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jcfollower · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-29 12:45:03Z

0

I don't quite understand your code and don't have too much time to study it, but I thought that the following might be helpful, at least if order isn't important ...

in_strings = ['Safety/Report/Image/489',
              'Safety/Report/Image/490',
              'Other/Misc/Text/500'
             ]

out_dict = {}             

for in_str in in_strings:
    level1, level2, level3, level4 = in_str.split('/')

    out_dict.setdefault(level1, {}).setdefault(
                        level2, {}).setdefault(
                        level3, []).append(level4)                        
print out_dict

{'Other': {'Misc': {'Text': ['500']}}, 'Safety': {'Report': {'Image': ['489', '490']}}}

answered Jul 29, 2011 at 12:45

jcfollower

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1 Comment

jcfollower Over a year ago

My code assumes that you have already read in the IDs from the csv file and put them into a python list.

j_syk · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-29 13:56:21Z

0

If your csv is line seperated:

#do something to load the csv 
split_lines = [x.strip() for x in csv_data.split('\n')]
for line_data in split_lines:
    split_parts = [x.strip() for x in line_data.split('/')]
    # do something with individual part data
    # such as some_variable = split_parts[1] etc
    # if using indexes, I'd be sure to catch for index errors in case you
    #   try to go to index 3 of something with only 2 parts

check out the python csv module for some importing help (I'm not too familiar).

edited Jul 29, 2011 at 13:56

answered Jul 29, 2011 at 13:49

j_syk

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