On Tue, 12 Jul 2005 08:25:50 -0700, rorley wrote:
OK, so my problem is I have a text file with all of these instances,
for example 5000 facts about animals. I need to go through the file
and put all of the facts (lines) that contain the word lion into a file
called lion.txt. If I come across an animal or other word for which a
file does not yet exist I need to create a file for that word and put
all instances of that word into that file. I realize that this should
probably create 30,000 files or so. Any help would be REALLY
appreciated. Thanks. Reece
Sounds like homework to me...
Start by breaking the big problem down into little problems:
Step 1: read the data from the file
You do that with something like this:
data = file("MyFile.txt", "r").read()
Notice I said *something like* -- that's a hint that you want to change
that to something slightly different.
Step 2: grab each line, one at a time
Somehow you want to read lines (hint! hint!) from the file, so that you
have a list of text lines in data. How do you read lines (hint!) from a
file in Python?
Once you do that, data should look something like this:
["lions are mammals\n", "lions eat meat\n", "sheep eat grass\n"]
So you can work with each line in data with:
for line in data:
do_something(line)
Step 3: grab each word from the line
I'll make this one easy for you:
words = line.split()
words now looks like: ["lions", "are", "mammals"]
Step 4: for each word, open a file:
This one is also easy:
for word in words:
fp = file(word, "w")
fp.write(all the other words)
fp.close()
Hint: this code won't quite do what you want. You need to change a few
things.
Does this help? Is that enough to get started? See how far you get, and
then come back for more help.
--
Steven.
