仅从文本文件中的某些行中删除“\\ n”

Question

I have a text file organized like this:

NAME: name\n
AGE: age\n
NOTES: random text\n
JOB: text
\n
NAME: name\n
AGE: age\n
NOTES: random text\n
JOB: text
\n

I only wrote 5 lines for each block of data but let's say I have 7 lines or more. I also wrote only 2 blocks here but my file may contain over 100, and my desired output would be a list of lists (preferably):

list=[[NAME: name\n, AGE: age\n, NOTES: random text\n, JOB: blabla, \n], [NAME: name\n, AGE: age\n, NOTES: random text\n, JOB: blabla, \n], [...]]

that I obtain with this code:

list_of_lists = [list[x:x+4] for x in range(0, len(list),4)]

but my problem is that sometime the random text into NOTES: contains extra \\n and may cause the grouping to be wrong:

list=[[NAME: name\n, AGE: age\n, NOTES: unwanted\n, newlines\n], [that ruin\n, my plans\n, \n, NAME: name\n] etc etc]

So basically all lines are ok, the problem is the NOTES one where people inserted some carriage that I don't want because they make the text into NOTES to be split into different lines in the text and different items in the list: I want to delete \\n in order to have the NOTES field grouped in one line (in the text) and in one item (in the list)

EDIT: Thanks for helping! I have tried some your solutions but still didn't solve my problem... So I edited my question to explain better (edited content in bold).

Answer 1

I suggest doing things a little bit differently:

result = []
d = {}
with open("file.txt") as f:
    for line in f:
        if line.startswith("NAME:"):
            if d:
                result.append(d)
            d = {}
        if any(line.startswith(key) for key in ("NAME:", "AGE:", "NOTES:")):
            key, value = line.strip().split(":", 1)
            d[key] = value
        else:
            d["NOTES"] += d["NOTES"] + line.strip()
    result.append(d)

This returns something like

[{'NOTES': ' random text random text', 'AGE': ' age', 'NAME': ' name'}, {'NOTES': ' random text random textother text. random text random textother text.', 'AGE': ' age', 'NAME': ' name'}]

Answer 2

Looks like this is intended to be a key value pair, Therefore first try splitting up the data into a list of dictionaries.

You can reverse the text file string using text[::-1] and then do a replace reverse_text.split(':EMAN') then reversing again the strings within the lists. This should give you a list ready for parsing into a dict looking like:

list = [
    ['NAME: name\n AGE: age\n NOTES: random text\n\n'],
    ['NAME: name\n AGE: age\n NOTES: random text\n\n'],
    ...,
    ]

Answer 3

You may achieve it using list comprehension as:

from StringIO import StringIO

myfile = StringIO("""NAME: name\n
AGE: age\n
NOTES: random text\n
\n
NAME: name\n
AGE: age\n
NOTES: random text\n
\n""")    # StringIO creates file like object

# You list comprehesion expression 
my_list = [["{}\n".format(item) for item in group.split("\n\n")+['']] for group in myfile.read().split("\n\n\n\n")]
#                               For adding extra `\n` at the end ^                              ^ 

where my_list will hold:

[['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: random text\n', '\n'], ['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: random text\n', '\n\n', '\n']]

In case you do not want \\n\\n as the second last element in the last sub-list, you may explicitly delete it as:

del my_list[-1][-2]

Now your my_list will hold the value:

[['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: random text\n', '\n'], ['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: random text\n', '\n']]

Answer 4

import re

# some example text:
my_text = """NAME: name\nAGE: age\nNOTES: random text\n\nNAME: name\nAGE: age\nJOB: job\nNOTES: random text\n\nblah \n\n blah\n\nNAME: name\nAGE: age\nNOTES: more \n random\n text\n\n""" 
# splitting up your text into a list of lists:
my_list = [[c.group(1) for c in re.finditer('(?ms)(?=(^[A-Z]+:.*?)(^[A-Z]+:|\Z))',chunk.group(1))] for chunk in re.finditer('(?ms)(?=(^NAME:.*?)(^NAME:|\Z))', my_text)]

This works by performing two regex searches. The first one finds all the text starting from NAME: up until right before the next NAME: or the end of the file. This essentially splits the text into your data for each person. Then, an almost identical regex is used to split each of these into lists of each attribute ( NAME , AGE , JOB , etc.). This regex assumes that each attribute label is in all caps, occurs at the beginning of a line, and is followed by a : .

The contents of my_list in the example above is:

[['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: random text\n\n'],
 ['NAME: name\n',
  'AGE: age\n',
  'JOB: job\n',
  'NOTES: random text\n\nblah \n\n blah\n\n'],
 ['NAME: name\n', 'AGE: age\n', 'NOTES: more \n random\n text\n\n']]