How do I compare 2 lines in a string in Python

Question

I have the console output stored in a string in Python.

It looks like:

output ="Status of xyz  
         Process is running

         Status of abc 
         Process is stopped"

I want to get last word of each line and compare with last word of next line. How can I do this in Python?.

Answer 1

First you need to separate the string into a list of lines:

lines = output.split('\n')  #splits into lines

Then you need to loop over the lines and split the line into words

#we go through all lines except the last, to check the line with the next
for lineIndex in range(len(lines)-1): 
    # split line to words
    WordsLine1 = lines[lineIndex].split() 
    WordsLine2 = lines[lineIndex+1].split() # split next line to words
    #now check if the last word of the line is equal to the last word of the other line.
    if ( WordsLine1[-1] == WordLine2[-1]):
        #equal do stuff..

Answer 2

Here's the data

data = """\
Status of xyz Process is running
Status of abc Process is stopped
"""    

Split into lines in a cross-platform manner:

lines = data.splitlines()

Loop over the lines pairwise, so you have the current line and the previous line at the same time (using zip ):

for previous, current in zip(lines, lines[1:]):
    lastword = previous.split()[-1]
    if lastword == current.split()[-1]:
        print('Both lines end with the same word: {word}'.format(word=lastword))

Alternatively, if you don't like how zip looks, we can loop over the lines pairwise by repeatedly setting a variable to store the last line:

last = None
for line in lines:
    if last is not None and line.split()[-1] == last.split()[-1]:
        print('both lines have the same last word')
    last = line