Extract specific lines from file and create sections of data in python

Question

Trying to write a python script to extract lines from a file. The file is a text file which is a dump of python suds output.

I want to:

1. strip all charac

Answer 1

Let's have some fun with iterators!

class SudsIterator(object):
    """extracts xsd strings from suds text file, and returns a 
    (key, (value1, value2, ...)) tuple with key being the 5th field"""
    def __init__(self, filename):
        self.data_file = open(filename)
    def __enter__(self):  # __enter__ and __exit__ are there to support 
        return self       # `with SudsIterator as blah` syntax
    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
        self.data_file.close()
    def __iter__(self):
        return self
    def next(self):     # in Python 3+ this should be __next__
        """looks for the next 'ArrayOf_xsd_string' item and returns it as a
        tuple fit for stuffing into a dict"""
        data = self.data_file
        for line in data:
            if 'ArrayOf_xsd_string' not in line:
                continue
            ignore = next(data)
            val1 = next(data).strip()[1:-2] # discard beginning whitespace,
            val2 = next(data).strip()[1:-2] #   quotes, and comma
            val3 = next(data).strip()[1:-2]
            val4 = next(data).strip()[1:-2]
            key = next(data).strip()[1:-2]
            val5 = next(data).strip()[1:-2]
            break
        else:
            self.data_file.close() # make sure file gets closed
            raise StopIteration()  # and keep raising StopIteration
        return key, (val1, val2, val3, val4, val5)

data = dict()
for key, value in SudsIterator('data.txt'):
    data[key] = value

print data