Re: joining strings question

I have some data with some categories, titles, subtitles, and a link
to their pdf and I need to join the title and the subtitle for every
file and divide them into their separate groups.

So the data comes in like this:

data = ['RULES', 'title','subtitle','pdf',
'title1','subtitle1','pdf1','NOTICES','title2','subtitle2','pdf','title3','subtitle3','pdf']

What I'd like to see is this:

[RULES', 'title subtitle','pdf', 'title1 subtitle1','pdf1'],
['NOTICES','title2 subtitle2','pdf','title3 subtitle3','pdf'], etc...

The following iterator yields things that look like each of those items:

def category_iterator(source):
source = iter(source)
last_cat = None
entries = []
try:
while True:
item = source.next()
if item == item.upper(): # categories are uppercase
if last_cat:
yield [last_cat] + entries
last_cat = item
entries = []
else:
title = item
subtitle = source.next()
link = source.next()
entries.append('%s %s' % (title, subtitle))
entries.append(link)
except StopIteration:
if last_cat:
yield [last_cat] + entries

if __name__ == '__main__':
data = ['RULES',
'title','subtitle','pdf',
'title1','subtitle1','pdf1',
'NOTICES',
'title2','subtitle2','pdf',
'title3','subtitle3','pdf']
for compact_category_info in category_iterator(data):
print repr(compact_category_info)

If your input data is malformed, you may get peculiar results depending on how pathologically malformed that data is.

Hope this helps,

-tkc



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