Removing a colon and all characters before it, in a python list

tangle · 09-12-2006, 09:27 AM

I am new to python, so this may be a stupid question.

I am working on a GUI application to configure idesk. The config file is laid out like this.

Code:

table Config
 FontName: tahoma
 FontSize: 8
 FontColor: #ffffff
 ToolTip.FontSize: 9
 ToolTip.FontName: gothic

I appended each line to a list using:

Code:

for line in inFile.readlines():
    if empty.match(line):
        continue
    else:
        list.append(resub('\n','',line))

The list prints out fine, but I want to have only the characters after the colon, which are the program's values. I woul dlike to load the current values in to an input box so the user knows what they are. I tried to get it to remove the colon when I appended the items to the list, but couldn't figure out how to.

So I decided the easiest way was to parse the list and remove the characters, but I am having problems. I can remove the colon or any other character using this:

Code:

listing = [item.replace(':','') for item in list)

I tried adding an astrics before the colon, but that didn't work. any help would be appreciated.

Proud · 09-12-2006, 03:10 PM

I haven't used Python in ages, but you need to take each line, find the index/position of the colon, and then slice from there to the end of the line. Check out either String or RegularExpression (RegEx) libraries for a function to find the colon's index, and then brush up on Strings/slicing to copy just the end of the line you want. Hope this helps.

Edit: from here, rsplit() should return the string you want as the first item in the list it returns.

Edit2: It may be faster to do i = line.index(":") and then line[i:]. Rather than rsplit() generating a list of pieces of the line.

tangle · 09-12-2006, 05:20 PM

I figured it out.

Code:

list.append(re.sub('^.*: ', '', prefs))

I had to have the period in there. Once I did that everything from the whitespace after the colon to the the beginning of the line was removed.

Thanks for the post.

ghostdog74 · 09-12-2006, 06:59 PM

you could use the split() function to split on colons.

Dan04 · 09-12-2006, 09:48 PM

line.split(':', 1)[-1]