How to read ansic file into a pre-defined class?

Sat Jan 8 21:51:38 EST 2011

Ying Zu <zuying at gmail.com> wrote:
>>How to read ansic file into a pre-defined class?

This is not an "ansic" file. It's just a plain old data file.
>I have a series of files written in the following format,
>>2 # number of classes
>100 # number of items for the first class object 
>0 foo
>1 foo
>...
>99 foo
>150 # number of items for the second class object 
>0 bar
>1 bar
>...
>149 bar
>>ultimately I want to read the file to two *structs* (sorry for my C
>jargon, just started playing with Python), with attributes
>number_of_items and data_array.
>>I wrote a simply code to read and split each line into a list, then
>try to tell the meaning of each line by the number of elements of
>each line list and the its position in the file. But it is
>definitely not the way Python should be used.

You don't really need to count the number of elements. The file tells you
how many of each to expect. This works:
 numclasses = int(f.next().strip())
 classlist = []
 for i in range(numclasses):
 numitems = int(f.next().strip())
 classlist.append(
 [f.next().strip().split() for j in range(numitems)]
 )
Then len(classlist) tells you how many classes. len(classlist[0]) tells
you how many items in the first class.
-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.