Question

I’m working on a Project Euler problem (for fun).
It comes with a 46kb txt file containing 1 line with a list of over 5000 names in the format like this:

"MARIA","SUSAN","ANGELA","JACK"...

My plan is to write a method to extract every name and append them into a Python list. Is regular expression the best weapon to tackle this problem?
I looked up the Python re doc, but am having hard time figuring out the right regex.

Answer 1

If the format of the file is as you say it is, i.e.

1. It’s a single line
2. The format is like this: “MARIA”,”SUSAN”,”ANGELA”,”JACK”

Then this should work:

>>> import csv
>>> lines = csv.reader(open('words.txt', 'r'), delimiter=',')
>>> words = lines.next()
>>> words
['MARIA', 'SUSAN', 'ANGELA', 'JACK']