Kent; Again thanks for the help. i am not sure if this is what you menat but i put
for line in s: jay = patno.findall(line) jay2 = "".join(jay[0]) print jay2 and it prints fine up until line 111 which is a line that had previously returned [ ] since a number didn't exist on that line and then exits with Traceback (most recent call last): File "patentno2.py", line 12, in ? jay2 = "".join(jay[0]) IndexError: list index out of range And as long as i am writing, how can I delete a return at the end of a line if the line ends in a certain pattern? For instance, if line ends with the abbreviation No. I want to join the current line with next line. Are lists immutable or can they be changed? Thanks again jay On Mar 31, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Kent Johnson wrote: > Jay Mutter III wrote: >> I have the following that I am using to extract "numbers' from a file >> ... >> which yields the following >> [('1', '337', '912')] > > ... >> So what do i have above ? A list of tuples? > > Yes, each line is a list containing one tuple containing three > string values. > >> How do I send the output to a file? > > When you print, the values are automatically converted to strings > by calling str() on them. When you use p2.write(), this conversion > is not automatic, you have to do it yourself via > p2.write(str(jay)) > > You can also tell the print statement to output to a file like this: > print >>p2, jay > >> Is there a way to get the output as >> 1337912 instead of [('1', '337', '912')] ? > > In [4]: jay=[('1', '337', '912')] > > jay[0] is the tuple alone: > In [6]: jay[0] > Out[6]: ('1', '337', '912') > > Join the elements together using an empty string as the separator: > In [5]: ''.join(jay[0]) > Out[5]: '1337912' > In [7]: > > Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor