Question

Emacs’s auto-fill mode splits the line to make the document look nice. I need to join the strings read from the document.

For example, (CR is the carriage return, not the real character)

  - Blah, Blah, and (CR)
    Blah, Blah, Blah, (CR)
    Blah, Blah (CR)
  - A, B, C (CR) 
    Blah, Blah, Blah, (CR)
    Blah, Blah (CR)

is read into string buffer array with readlines() function to produce

["Blah, Blah, and Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah", "A, B, C Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah"]

I thought about having loop to check ‘-‘ to concatenate all the stored strings before it, but I expect Python has efficient way to do this.

ADDED:

Based on kindall’s code, I could get what I want as follows.

lines = ["- We shift our gears toward nextGen effort"," contribute the work with nextGen."]
out = [(" " if line.startswith(" ") else "\n") + line.strip() for line in lines]
print out
res = ''.join(out).split('\n')[1:]
print res

The result is as follows.

['\n- We shift our gears toward nextGen effort', ' contribute the work with nextGen.']
['- We shift our gears toward nextGen effort contribute the work with nextGen.']

Answer 1

As I read it, your problem is to undo hard-wrapping and restore each set of indented lines to a single soft-wrapped line. This is one way to do it:

# hard-coded input, could also readlines() from a file
lines = ["- Blah, Blah, and", 
         "  Blah, Blah, Blah,",
         "  Blah, Blah",
         "- Blah, Blah, and",
         "  Blah, Blah, Blah,",
         "  Blah, Blah"]

out = [(" " if line.startswith(" ") else "\n") + line.strip() for line in lines]
out = ''.join(out)[1:].split('\n')

print out