Question

See updated input and output data at Edit-1.

What I am trying to accomplish is turning

+ 1
 + 1.1
  + 1.1.1
   - 1.1.1.1
   - 1.1.1.2
 + 1.2
  - 1.2.1
  - 1.2.2
 - 1.3
+ 2
- 3

into a python data structure such as

[{'1': [{'1.1': {'1.1.1': ['1.1.1.1', '1.1.1.2']}, '1.2': ['1.2.1', '1.2.2']}, '1.3'], '2': {}}, ['3',]]

I’ve looked at many different wiki markup languages, markdown, restructured text, etc but they are all extremely complicated for me to understand how it works since they must cover a large amount of tags and syntax (I would only need the “list” parts of most of these but converted to python instead of html of course.)

I’ve also taken a look at tokenizers, lexers and parsers but again they are much more complicated than I need and that I can understand.

I have no idea where to begin and would appreciate any help possible on this subject. Thanks

Edit-1: Yes the character at the beginning of the line matters, from the required output from before and now it could be seen that the * denotes a root node with children, the + has children and the – has no children (root or otherwise) and is just extra information pertaining to that node. The * is not important and can be interchanged with + (I can get root status other ways.)

Therefore the new requirement would be using only * to denote a node with or without children and – cannot have children. I’ve also changed it so the key isn’t the text after the * since that will no doubt changer later to an actual title.

For example

* 1
 * 1.1
 * 1.2
  - Note for 1.2
* 2
* 3
- Note for root

would give

[{'title': '1', 'children': [{'title': '1.1', 'children': []}, {'title': '1.2', 'children': []}]}, {'title': '2', 'children': [], 'notes': ['Note for 1.2', ]}, {'title': '3', 'children': []}, 'Note for root']

Or if you have another idea to represent the outline in python then bring it forward.

Answer 1

Edit: thanks to the clarification and change in the spec I’ve edited my code, still using an explicit Node class as an intermediate step for clarity — the logic is to turn the list of lines into a list of nodes, then turn that list of nodes into a tree (by using their indent attribute appropriately), then print that tree in a readable form (this is just a “debug-help” step, to check the tree is well constructed, and can of course get commented out in the final version of the script — which, just as of course, will take the lines from a file rather than having them hardcoded for debugging!-), finally build the desired Python structure and print it. Here’s the code, and as we’ll see after that the result is almost as the OP specifies with one exception — but, the code first:

import sys

class Node(object):
  def __init__(self, title, indent):
    self.title = title
    self.indent = indent
    self.children = []
    self.notes = []
    self.parent = None
  def __repr__(self):
    return 'Node(%s, %s, %r, %s)' % (
        self.indent, self.parent, self.title, self.notes)
  def aspython(self):
    result = dict(title=self.title, children=topython(self.children))
    if self.notes:
      result['notes'] = self.notes
    return result

def print_tree(node):
  print ' ' * node.indent, node.title
  for subnode in node.children:
    print_tree(subnode)
  for note in node.notes:
    print ' ' * node.indent, 'Note:', note

def topython(nodelist):
  return [node.aspython() for node in nodelist]

def lines_to_tree(lines):
  nodes = []
  for line in lines:
    indent = len(line) - len(line.lstrip())
    marker, body = line.strip().split(None, 1)
    if marker == '*':
      nodes.append(Node(body, indent))
    elif marker == '-':
      nodes[-1].notes.append(body)
    else:
      print>>sys.stderr, "Invalid marker %r" % marker

  tree = Node('', -1)
  curr = tree
  for node in nodes:
    while node.indent <= curr.indent:
      curr = curr.parent
    node.parent = curr
    curr.children.append(node)
    curr = node

  return tree


data = """\
* 1
 * 1.1
 * 1.2
  - Note for 1.2
* 2
* 3
- Note for root
""".splitlines()

def main():
  tree = lines_to_tree(data)
  print_tree(tree)
  print
  alist = topython(tree.children)
  print alist

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

When run, this emits:

 1
  1.1
  1.2
  Note: 1.2
 2
 3
 Note: 3

[{'children': [{'children': [], 'title': '1.1'}, {'notes': ['Note for 1.2'], 'children': [], 'title': '1.2'}], 'title': '1'}, {'children': [], 'title': '2'}, {'notes': ['Note for root'], 'children': [], 'title': '3'}]

Apart from the ordering of keys (which is immaterial and not guaranteed in a dict, of course), this is almost as requested — except that here all notes appear as dict entries with a key of notes and a value that’s a list of strings (but the notes entry is omitted if the list would be empty, roughly as done in the example in the question).

In the current version of the question, how to represent the notes is slightly unclear; one note appears as a stand-alone string, others as entries whose value is a string (instead of a list of strings as I’m using). It’s not clear what’s supposed to imply that the note must appear as a stand-alone string in one case and as a dict entry in all others, so this scheme I’m using is more regular; and if a note (if any) is a single string rather than a list, would that mean it’s an error if more than one note appears for a node? In the latter regard, this scheme I’m using is more general (lets a node have any number of notes from 0 up, instead of just 0 or 1 as apparently implied in the question).

Having written so much code (the pre-edit answer was about as long and helped clarify and change the specs) to provide (I hope) 99% of the desired solution, I hope this satisfies the original poster, since the last few tweaks to code and/or specs to make them match each other should be easy for him to do!