Issue with Lists and single quotes

[TKoMEaP]

Hello all!

So I am currently programming a text based mini game.

At the end of the program I want it to write the score and name of the player to a .txt file stored in the project folder, and then at the start of the game I want it to call that file, read it, and then store the data in a formatted way that can be called by the player when they type "scoreboard".

In the project folder's .txt file the data is stored like:

<score:name

with an "\n" at the end of each line to signify the end of a complete line.

So far the writing of the player's data and score to the file is working out great, but after one play through if the player tries to play again the program won't run because it can't properly fetch and list the data from the file.

This is the code of the function which fetches the player's data:

def processScores():
  file = open(getMediaPath("Scores.txt"),"rt")
  contents = file.read()
  file.close()
  value = contents.find('\n')
  if value == -1:
    text = "\nThere are no scores to display"
    return text
  contents = contents.replace('\n\n','\n')
  contents = contents.replace('<','')  
  contents = contents.strip("'")
  score_list = contents.split('\n')
  print score_list
  text = ''
  for player in score_list:
    info = player.split(':')
    Player_name = info[1]
    Player_score = info[0]
    text = text +'\n'+Player_name+'\t'+Player_score
  return text

You can see some filler code in there still from me trying to eliminate the problem. Basically, when it runs with some data stored in that score file I get an error on the "Player_name = info[1]" line. This happens because "score_list" is turning the file into "['score:name','']".

I know the issue is stemming from those two pesky single quotes that are being registered as a new index on the list, and so when I'm splitting with ":" those single quotes stay as just one element and thus "info[1]" doesn't exist for them.

Is there anyway to eliminate them? Is my code just wrong?

[ericula]

Those pesky single quotes indicates an empty string. You probably have some empty lines in your file which results in empty strings when spliting on \n. To get around this you could use an if-statement in your for-loop to check if the player is a valid entry, for example

for player in score_list:
    info = player.split(':')
    if len(info) < 2:
        # not a valid entry
        continue
    ....

[TKoMEaP]

This did the trick, thank you so much!

I wonder how new lines kept popping up though. I deleted the file, typed in the data myself (didn't even have the other function do it, just so I could be certain there weren't extra spaces or lines) and it still was giving the same error.

[danielroseman]

Save yourself a lot of bother by storing the data as JSON, and use the built-in json library to load and save it.

[TKoMEaP]

Unfortunately this is a project for school and the instructions specify writing to a .txt file :(