String to Csv file using Python

Question

I have the following string

string = "OGC Number | LT No | Job /n 9625878 | EPP3234 | 1206545/n" and continues on 

I am trying to write it to a .CSV file where it will look like this:

OGC Number | LT No | Job 
------------------------------
9625878 | EPP3234 | 1206545
9708562 | PGP43221 | 1105482
9887954 | BCP5466 | 1025454

• where each newline in the string is a new row
• where each "|" in the sting is a new column

I am having trouble getting the formatting.

I think I need to use:

string.split('/n')
string.split('|')

Thanks.

Windows 7, Python 2.6

• Gerrat: What does your program look like? What trouble are you having?
• Tristan Forward: Updated in response to comments

Answer 1

Untested:

text="""
OGC Number | LT No | Job 
------------------------------
9625878 | EPP3234 | 1206545
9708562 | PGP43221 | 1105482
9887954 | BCP5466 | 1025454"""
import csv
lines = text.splitlines()
with open('outputfile.csv', 'wb') as fout:
 csvout = csv.writer(fout)
 csvout.writerow(lines[0]) # header
 for row in lines[2:]: # content
 csvout.writerow([col.strip() for col in row.split('|')])

Answer 2

If you are interested in using a third party module. Prettytable is very useful and has a nice set of features to deal with and print tabular data.

Answer 3

EDIT: Oops, I missunderstood your question!

The code below will use two regular expressions to do the modifications.

import re
str="""OGC Number | LT No | Job 
------------------------------
9625878 | EPP3234 | 1206545
9708562 | PGP43221 | 1105482
9887954 | BCP5466 | 1025454
"""
# just setup above 
# remove all lines with at least 4 dashes
str=re.sub( r'----+\n', '', str )
# replace all pipe symbols with their 
# surrounding spaces by single semicolons
str=re.sub( r' +\| +', ';', str )
print str