What about choosing a native Python data structure for this?
A list of attributes comes to mind, as presence of one can be easily
tested with
if x in attributes:
do_something
Here's a test:
>>> elements= {}
>>> elements['boat'] = ['a', 'b', 'j', 'k']
>>> 'a' in elements['boat']
True
>>>
Then it is just a matter of getting the fiels into the structure, and
then recursing through the elements, like this.
elements = {}
for line in table_fileo:
fields = line.split()
#get rid of linefeed
fields[-1] = fields[-1][:-1]
elements[fields[-1]] = fields[:-1]
Then you get a dictionary with the last name in the table as key and a
list of the other attributes as value.
Then, if you want to look for an attribute, just do:
for element in elements.items():
if 'j' in element[1]:
print element[0]
What do you think?
Hugo
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