Question

I have a very complex parsing problem. Any thoughts would be appreciated here. I have a test.dat file.The file to be parsed looks like this:

*   Number                  =              40

Time =  0
  1   10.13   10   10.11   12   13
  .
  .

Time =  n
  1   10   10   10   12.50   13
  .
  .

There are N time blocks and each block has 40 lines like shown above. What I would like to do is add e.g. the 1st line of first block , then 1st line in block #2 .. and so on to to a new file -test_1.dat. Similarly, 2nd line of every block to test_2.datand so on.The lines in the block should be written as is to the new _n.dat file. Is there any way to do this? The number I have assumed here is 40, so if the * number = 40 there will be 40 lines under each time block.

regards,
Ris

Answer 1

You can read the file in as a list of strings (call it fileList), where each string is a different line:

f = open('filename')
fileList = f.readlines()

Then, remove the “header” part of your file with

fileList.pop(0)
fileList.pop(0)

Then, do

outFileContents = {} # This will be a dict, where number -> content of test_number.dat
for outFileName in range(1,41): #outFileName will be the number going after the _ in your filename
    outFileContents[outFileName] = []
    for n in range(40): # Counting through the time blocks
        currentRowIndex = (42 * n) + outFileName # 42 to account for the Time = and blank row
        outFileContents[outFileName].append(fileList[currentRowIndex])

Finally you can loop through outFileContents and write the contents of each value to separate files.