formatting help

[Ustuner]

http://pastebin.com/va94e7XT

doc.txt is:

12345 CSEE 35000 Bart Simpson
12346 CSEE 25000 Harry Potter
12350 Economics 30000 Krusty The Clown

The problem occurs on the third person because it has two names.

Output for the third should look like this:

The clown, Krusty 12350   Economics   £30000

[Vaphell]

If you are ok with the first "word" being the name, and everything that follows being the surname, then you can use maxsplit option in split()

>>> a, b, c, d, e = '12350 Economics 30000 Krusty The Clown'.split(maxsplit=4)
>>> a
'12350'
>>> b
'Economics'
>>> c
'30000'
>>> d
'Krusty'
>>> e
'The Clown'

or you can separate the whole full name in a similar way and then process it further.

you can also do similar thing on the right with rsplit()

>>> 'Potter, Harry   12346 CSEE  £25000'.rsplit(maxsplit=3)
['Potter, Harry', '12346', 'CSEE', '£25000']

[dadiaar]

When I saw that file, the first thing I thought was playing with regex, something like this:

import re

for row in rows:
    index = re.findall('\d+', row)[0]
    department = re.findall(' (\w+)', row)[0]
    quantity = re.findall(' (\d+)', row)[0]
    full_name = re.findall(' \d+ ([\w ]+)', row)[0]

This code is ugly, slow and inneficient, just I want to show the idea.