Question

I’m trying to match values of a list to a regex pattern. If the particular value within the list matches, I’ll append it to a different list of dicts. If the above mentioned value does not match, I want to remove the value from the list.

import subprocess

def list_installed():
    rawlist = subprocess.check_output(['yum', 'list', 'installed']).splitlines()
    #print rawlist
    for each_item in rawlist:
        if "[\w86]" or \
        "noarch" in each_item:
            print each_item #additional stuff here to append list of dicts
            #i haven't done the appending part yet
            #the list of dict's will be returned at end of this funct
        else:
            remove(each_item)

list_installed()

The end goal is to eventually be able to do something similar to:

nifty_module.tellme(installed_packages[3]['version'])
nifty_module.dosomething(installed_packages[6])

Note to gnu/linux users going wtf:
This will eventually grow into a larger sysadmin frontend.

Answer 1

Despite the lack of an actual question in your post, I’ll make a couple of comments.

• You have a problem here:

  if "[\w86]" or "noarch" in each_item:
  

  It’s not interpreted the way you think of it and it always evaluates to True. You probably need

  if "[\w86]" in each_item or "noarch" in each_item:
  

Also, I’m not sure what you are doing, but in case you expect that Python will do regex matching here: it won’t. If you need that, look at re module.

• remove(each_item)

  I don’t know how it’s implemented, but it probably won’t work if you expect it to remove the element from rawlist: remove won’t be able to actually access the list defined inside list_installed. I’d advise to use rawlist.remove(each_item) instead, but not in this case, because you are iterating over rawlist. You need to re-think the procedure a little (create another list and append needed elements to it instead of removing, for example).