Hi Liam, I'm not sure I really understand what you are trying to get to here.
Can you provide a short sample of before/after data so we can see what we are trying to achieve? Alan G ----- Original Message ----- From: "Liam Clarke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Python Tutor" <tutor@python.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 1:18 PM Subject: [Tutor] strings & splitting Hi all, I have a large string which I'm attempting to manipulate, which I find very convenient to call large_string.split(" ") on to conveniently tokenise. Except, however for the double quoted strings within my string, which contain spaces. At the moment I'm doing a split by \n, and then looping line by line, splitting by spaces and then reuniting double quoted strings by iterating over the split line, looking for mismatched quotation marks, storing the indexes of each matching pair and then: for (l,r) in pairs: . sub_string = q[l:r+1] #Up to r and including it. . rejoined_string = " ".join(sub_string) . indices = range(l,r+1) . indices.reverse() . for i in indices: q.pop(i) . q.insert(l, rejoined_string) I'm doing it split line by split line, extending the resulting line into a big flat list as I found out that Python doesn't cope overly well with stuff like the above when it's a 800,000 item list, I think it was the insert mainly. My question is, is there a more Pythonic solution to this? I was thinking of using a regex to pluck qualifying quoted-space-including sentences out, and then trying to remember where they went based on context, but that sounds prone to error; so I thought of perhaps the same thing with a unique token of my own that I can find once the list is created and then sub the original string back in, but I wonder if calling index() repeatedly would be any faster. I've got it down to 3 seconds now, but I'm trying to get... a stable solution, if possible an elegant solution.The current one is prone to breaking based on funny whitespace and is just ugly and prickly looking. Regards, Liam Clarke _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor