Question

I know I’ve seen a good algorithm for this, but having trouble finding it.

I’ve got a (poorly formatted) output from a tool (whose output style I cannot control) that I need to parse.

It looks something like this:

NameOfItemA
attribute1 = values1
attribute2 = values2
...
attributen = valuesn
NameOfItemB
attribute1 = values1
attribute2 = values2
...
attributen = valuesn        

Where NameOfItemX and attributeX is a clearly defined set of known names. Need to turn it into reasonable objects:

ObjectForA.attribute1 = values1

etc.

I know I’ve done this before, just cant remember how I did it. It looked something like:

for line in textinput:
    if line.find("NameOfItem"):
        ... parse until next one ...

Hopefully what I’m saying makes sense and someone can help

Answer 1

what about:

class obj(object): pass
items={}
for line in textinput:
    if(line.find("NameOfItem")!=-1):
       current_object=items[line.replace("NameOfItem","")]=obj()
    else:
       attr,val=line.split('=',1)
       setattr(current_object,attr.strip(),val.strip())

Of course, you could ommit the basic object if you already have a class you want to use…
After all is said and done, you have a dictionary of objects with keys=object_names and values = attributes (as strings — You’ll need to convert to whatever type it is supposed to be if it’s not a string)

Also note that this input file format looks A LOT like that of the ConfigParser module. You could probably read the file and change the "NameOfItem" lines to [item] lines and pass that to ConfigParser as a StringIO object…