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I looked all over the net but could not find if it is possible to
insert wildcards into strings. What I am trying to do is this: I am
trying to parse text from a Bible file. In case you're not familiar
with the way the Bible organizes itself, it is broken down into Books >
Chapters > Verses. The particular text I am working with are organized
into Book files (*.txt -- flat text file). Here is what the file looks
like:

{1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.

Of course the {*} can be of any length, so I can't just do .split()
based on the length of the bracket text. What I would like to do is to
..split() using something akin to this:

textdata.split('{*}') # The '*' being a wildcard

Is this possible to do? If so, how is it done?

Thanks,

Harlin Seritt

Harlin Seritt wrote:

> I looked all over the net but could not find if it is possible to
> insert wildcards into strings. What I am trying to do is this: I am
> trying to parse text from a Bible file. In case you're not familiar
> with the way the Bible organizes itself, it is broken down into Books >
> Chapters > Verses. The particular text I am working with are organized
> into Book files (*.txt -- flat text file). Here is what the file looks
> like:
>
> {1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.
>
> Of course the {*} can be of any length, so I can't just do .split()
> based on the length of the bracket text. What I would like to do is to
> .split() using something akin to this:
>
> textdata.split('{*}') # The '*' being a wildcard
>
> Is this possible to do? If so, how is it done?

You can use the split function in the re module with a suitable regular
expression:

>>> re.split('{\d+:\d+}', textdata)
['', ' Random text here. ', ' More text here. and so on.']

{\d+:\d+} means 'match {, then one or more digits, then :, then one or
more digits, then }'.

re.split('{.*}', textdata) would be a more direct translation of your
wildcard, but that doesn't work: .* matches as much as possible, so in
your example it would match '{1:1} Random text here. {1:2}' instead of
just '{1:1}' and '{1:2}'.

--
If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood
on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton

Roel Schroeven

Harlin Seritt wrote:
> {1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.
>
> Of course the {*} can be of any length, so I can't just do .split()
> based on the length of the bracket text. What I would like to do is to
> .split() using something akin to this:
>
> textdata.split('{*}') # The '*' being a wildcard
>
> Is this possible to do? If so, how is it done?
>

You should look into re module.
regex has more flexible features for text processing than string
module or methods.

- Regular expression operations
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-re.html
- HOWTO
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/

In your case, the code would go like this:

>>> text = '{1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.'
>>> import re
>>> pattern = re.compile('{\d+:\d+}')
>>> pattern.split(text)
['', ' Random text here. ', ' More text here. and so on.']

--
george

http://www.dynkin.com/

Harlin Seritt wrote:
> I looked all over the net but could not find if it is possible to
> insert wildcards into strings. What I am trying to do is this: I am
> trying to parse text from a Bible file. In case you're not familiar
> with the way the Bible organizes itself, it is broken down into Books >
> Chapters > Verses. The particular text I am working with are organized
> into Book files (*.txt -- flat text file). Here is what the file looks
> like:
>
> {1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.
>
> Of course the {*} can be of any length, so I can't just do .split()
> based on the length of the bracket text. What I would like to do is to
> .split() using something akin to this:
>
> textdata.split('{*}') # The '*' being a wildcard

You can do this with the re module. For example

>>> import re
>>> s = '{1:1} Random text here. {1:2} More text here. and so on.'
>>> re.split(r'\{[^}]+\}', s)
['', ' Random text here. ', ' More text here. and so on.']

If you want to be a little stricter in what you accept for the split you could look explicitly for
digits:
>>> re.split(r'\{\d+:\d+\}', s)
['', ' Random text here. ', ' More text here. and so on.']

Kent

George that is what I'm looking for. Thanks, Harlin