Hi John,
I would just like to suggest a different approach. Like the old saying goes:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll
use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
— Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs
If the delimiter is always the same ('@') you can use split() to get the
data. Then you can arrange the data in a dictionary of lists, like this.
collapsed_data = {}
for line in mydata:
id_part, data_part = line[:-1].split('@')
try:
collapsed_data[id_part].append(data_part)
except KeyError:
#first time insert for that key
collapsed_data[id_part] = [data_part]
for id, data in collapsed_data.iteritems():
print '@'.join([id] + data)
That should be it. Python's data types are very powerful. Of course you
could just build a huge list comprehension that does it...
Hope that helps,
Hugo
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