Question

I have checked and played with various examples and it appears that my problem is a bit more complex than what I have been able to find. What I need to do is search for a particular string and then delete the following line and keep deleting lines until another string is found. So an example would be the following:

a
b
color [
0 0 0,
1 1 1,
3 3 3,
] #color
y
z

Here, "color [" is match1, and "] #color" is match2. So then what is desired is the following:

a
b
color [
] #color
y
z

Answer 1

This “simple to follow” code example will get you started .. you can tweak it as needed. Note that it processes the file line-by-line, so this will work with any size file.

start_marker = 'startdel'
end_marker = 'enddel'

with open('data.txt') as inf:
    ignoreLines = False
    for line in inf:
        if start_marker in line:
            print line,
            ignoreLines = True
        if end_marker in line:
            ignoreLines = False            
        if not ignoreLines:
            print line,

It uses startdel and enddel as “markers” for starting and ending the ignoring of data.

Update:

Modified code based on a request in the comments, this will now include/print the lines that contain the “markers”.

Given this input data (borrowed from @drewk):

Beginning of the file...
stuff
startdel
   delete this line
   delete this line also
enddel
stuff as well
the rest of the file...  

it yields:

Beginning of the file...
stuff
startdel
enddel
stuff as well
the rest of the file...