I’ve independently talked about Python with Harry and Lars last week. Conclusion: Python seems to be “the” script language to learn if you want something versatile and hate Perl.
Today I needed a small script: Find me all the 4-lettered family names from the US Census data. Usually I’d simply do that with awk. But what better opportunity to actually start using Python?
I have the family name list in ASCII form. Nicely formatted in columns with whitespace separators. All I need is a small Python script that will loop over stdin and match as required. No huhu:
import sys
import re
while True:
line=sys.stdin.readline()
m = re.match(‘^[A-Z]{,4} ‘,line)
if m != None:
print m.string[m.start():m.end()]
if line == “”:
break
That wasn’t so difficult.