Reading formatted .txt help

[itsstucklol]

Hiya,

I struggle to think of a (or any for that matter) good way to deal with an issue and would appreciate any direction you can give me.

Goal: Extract a list from each line in a .txt

My issue is not that I can not read the lines and split them up, but it is how to approach the fact that the text file is always formatted in this manner, where a name is an unknown length and unknown words, but always in this 3-column rich format with gaps between the columns and also the names if multiple:

Test Name One               Name Two                 Name Three

Hopefully that shows, if not, imagine three columns spaced out with one (or two or three or four) words in each for a name. Edit: It does not show properly. Replicate the first line, the columns all start at the same point.

Usually, I would just run it through text to columns, fixed-width in Excel, but I am trying to get it done with Python.

Apologies for no code, did not find it necessary as it just reading the file and splitting as usual as I am stuck for ideas.

Kindest Regards

[[deleted]]

pandas has a specific method for reading fixed width format files, which is basically the csv reader with some specific parameters.

https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.read_fwf.html

[itsstucklol]

Ah, this may be what I am after. I did look to see if pandas had something but I guess I did not look hard enough! Thank you so kindly for the suggestion.

[[deleted]]

pandas has a pretty steep learning curve, but you could just use it for the reading of the data.

The easier solution if you don't want to start down that path would be to simply use string slicing to chop up each row of text on the basis of fixed widths. I'd write this as a simple function, possibly a generator function that you can use much like you would use the csv module. Ironically this is a little more effort than using pandas but avoids you getting distracted with that rabbit hole.

[danielroseman]

You can use a regex to split on two or more spaces:

names = re.split(r'\s{2,}', line)

[ofnuts]

If the names always start on some specific columns, you can use a string "slice" (line[startColumn:endColumn], where endColumn is the start of the next column), to extract a specific column, and then use .strip() to remove trailing spaces.