So, list or tuple or other?

[Rick3414]

I am pulling a name, address, phone number from a text file. The items are delimited with a comma. I pull them into a variable. How can I pull them in or parse them out?

I'm not sure if this is a tuple or a list or what, but when I use vari=filename.read() it puts the variable as 'name,address,phone' and I cannot get them split up into separate fields.

Any advise would be appreciated, and I'm sorry about the format of this message I saw something about code wrap but it disappeared from my screen when I typed.

FILE=open(Data,'r')
vari=FILE.read()

The output shows 'vari' contains every item from FILE and I cannot separate them.

[scru]

You can do fh.read().split(',') to split the line into a list of

Python also has a built-in csv module.

As to the code tags, you want to change the first one to [ code=python ]: leave the second one as is.

[vegaseat]

Here is one way to do this sort of thing ...

# name, address, phone data processing

data = """\
Carl Arm, 123 Malt Rd Carlson MO, 712-123-4567
Frank Fern, 21 S. West St Blippo CA, 901-321-7654
Mimi Mink, 13 Arbor St Draft NY, 204-777-9631"""

filename = 'MyAddBook.txt'
# create a test file
fout = open(filename, "w")
fout.write(data)
fout.close()

# now read the address file back in as a list of lines
fin = open(filename, "r")
raw_list = fin.readlines()
fin.close()

# test it, you should get a list with each data line being a string item ...
print(raw_list)

# now process this raw list to get a list of [name, address, phone] lists
my_list = []
for line in raw_list:
    # remove any trailing newline
    line = line.rstrip()
    # split the line at the commas
    name, address, phone = line.split(',')
    # remove any leading spaces from address and phone
    address = address.lstrip()
    phone = phone.lstrip()
    #print(name, address, phone)
    my_list.append([name, address, phone])

print('-'*60)
# test it ...
print(my_list)
print('-'*60)

# search the list for a complete name ...
search = 'Mimi Mink'
for item in my_list:
    if search in item:
        # unpack the item (sub list)
        name, address, phone = item
        print(name)
        print(address)
        print(phone)

print('-'*60)

# another search, this time part of an address ...
search = 'Blippo CA'
for item in my_list:
    # unpack the item (sub list)
    name, address, phone = item
    # you are looking for a part of the address
    if search in address:
        print(name)
        print(address)
        print(phone)

"""
my beautified output -->
['Carl Arm, 123 Malt Rd Carlson MO, 712-123-4567\n',
'Frank Fern, 21 S. West St Blippo CA, 901-321-7654\n',
'Mimi Mink, 13 Arbor St Draft NY, 204-777-9631']
------------------------------------------------------------
[['Carl Arm', '123 Malt Rd Carlson MO', '712-123-4567'],
['Frank Fern', '21 S. West St Blippo CA', '901-321-7654'],
['Mimi Mink', '13 Arbor St Draft NY', '204-777-9631']]
------------------------------------------------------------
Mimi Mink
13 Arbor St Draft NY
204-777-9631
------------------------------------------------------------
Frank Fern
21 S. West St Blippo CA
901-321-7654
"""

From there you can expand to updating/editing and saving your data. Note that the reason to keep things in lists is so you can change data elements.