Question

I have a text file that I would like to restructure. The file contains features, a description of the features(tab delim, the number of descriptors will vary), and a list of people displaying that feature. It looks like this:

Feature1    detail1    detail2
Person1
Person2
Feature2    detail1    detail2    detail3
Person3

…and I would just like to restructure it so that there is one feature per row, with the persons tacked onto the line after the descriptors so it would look like this:

 Feature1    detail1    detail2    Person1    Person2
 Feature2    detail1    detail2    detail3    Person3

I would like to use a Python dictionary. My code which will read each Feature as a key and append the details as values, but I am having trouble adding the Persons as values. Can anyone help?

import re
import sys
import csv

def reformat(filename):
    mydict = dict()
    for line in filename:
        m = re.search("\AFeature",line[0])  
        if m:
            if str(line) in mydict:
                mydict[line].append(line[0])
            else:
                mydict[line[0]] = (line[1:-1])
    print(mydict)

thefilename = "path"
path_reader=csv.reader(open(thefilename), delimiter = "\t")
rv = reformat(path_reader)

edit: fixed code indentation

Answer 1

I only changed the if ... else part:

def reformat(filename):
    mydict = dict()
    feature = ''
    for line in filename:
        m = re.search("\AFeature",line[0])  
        if m:
            feature = line[0]
            mydict[feature] = (line[1:-1])
        else:
            mydict[feature].append(line[0])
print(mydict)