Question

This probably measures how pythonic you are. I’m playing around trying to learn python so Im not close to being pythonic enough. The infile is a dummy patriline and I want a list of father son.

infile:

haffi jolli dkkdk lkskkk lkslll sdkjl kljdsfl klsdlj sdklja asldjkl

code:

def main():
    infile = open('C:\Users\Notandi\Desktop\patriline.txt', 'r')
    line = infile.readline()               
    tmpstr = line.split('\t')
    for i in tmpstr[::2]:
        print i, '\t', i + 1
    infile.close()
main()

The issue is i + 1; I want to print out two strings in every line. Is this clear?

Answer 1

You are getting confused between the words in the split string and their indices. For example, the first word is “haffi” but the first index is 0.

To iterate over both the indices and their corresponding words, use enumerate:

for i, word in enumerate(tmpstr):
    print word, tmpstr[i+1]

Of course, this looks messy. A better way is to just iterate over pairs of strings. There are many ways to do this; here’s one.

def pairs(it):
    it = iter(it)
    for element in it:
        yield element, next(it)

for word1, word2 in pairs(tmpstr):
    print word1, word2