Question

I’m reading a file and each line has a tag, followed by a colon and then the information that I want. A sample file would look like

Package: com.something.something
Section: Utilities
Name: Something

etc, (It’s an apt packages index if you’re wondering)
so I want to loop through each line and see if that line starts with an element from a list. I was thinking something like

PkgInfo={}
Tags=['Package', 'Section', 'Name']
for line in reader.readlines()
    if line.startswith(element in Tags):
        PkgInfo[element]=line.split(': ')[1]

This code doesn’t work, but hopefully you understand what I am trying to do. How would I go about accomplishing this?

Answer 1

Working solution with slightly different logic:

PkgInfo={}
Tags=['Package', 'Section', 'Name']


for line in reader.readlines():
    entry = line.strip().split(': ', 2)
    if len(entry) != 2:
        continue
    element, value = entry[0], entry[1]
    if element in Tags:
        PkgInfo[element] = value

print PkgInfo

And pay attention to the fact that iteration over elements was not only one problem. ‘Package’ in Tags was defined as ‘Package: ‘, Tags in loop referenced as tags, split.line instead line.split(), value isn’t stripped.