Python : What is a string array? [closed]

So I'm doing this coding challenge in Python and the problem says that the input is a string array. I downloaded a sample input, and the .txt file is like this:

string array

.txt

13
Alice;START
Bob;START
Bob;1
Carson;START
Alice;15
Carson;6
David;START
David;24
Evil;START
Evil;24
Evil;START
Evil;18
Fiona;START


Honestly, I don't know how to process that input, so I failed the challenge badly. However, I'm still interested in learning.

I tried to process the input using split(";").

split(";")

Any ideas how to parse this input?

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

11;Evil;SHORTENED_JOB

Evil

11

2 Answers
2

with open("your_file.txt") as f:
array = [line.rstrip().split(";") for line in f]


The explanation:

The first line is a safe way to open a text file. (The file will be automatically closed after the work).

f at the end of that line becomes the name of the iterable object - with every iteration we obtain the full next line from the opened text file.

f

Now we use that object for creating the list by a List Comprehension (the second line) - see the end of that line:

for line in f]


Because the line contains the full line, i. e. with trailing newline (n) symbol, we use the rstrip() method to trim it out:

line

n

rstrip()

[line.rstrip() for line in f]


And finally we split every such string into a list (using the delimiter symbol ;)

;

[line.rstrip().split(";") for line in f]


and assign the result to the variable array:

array

array = [line.rstrip().split(";") for line in f]


The test:

from pprint import pprint
pprint(array)


The output:

[['13'],
['Alice', 'START'],
['Bob', 'START'],
['Bob', '1'],
['Carson', 'START'],
['Alice', '15'],
['Carson', '6'],
['David', 'START'],
['David', '24'],
['Evil', 'START'],
['Evil', '24'],
['Evil', 'START'],
['Evil', '18'],
['Fiona', 'START']]


Note:

The first line of your text file contains the number 13 - it is probably the number of remaining lines. If you want ignore it, just append the [1:] to the second line of code:

[1:]

with open("your_file.txt") as f:
array = [line.rstrip().split(";") for line in f][1:]


There is no enough details but I would assume that the first line is the number of examples and the following lines contain the tuples which are, in fact, the string array you mentioned.

I would go the following way:

with open ("input.txt") as f:
no_examples = f.readline().strip()
array =
for i in range(no_examples):
example = f.readline().strip().split(';')
array.append(example)


The assignment to example variable strips the invisible line end characters and splits the result by the separator ;.

example

;