Question

This is a Python related question.

My returned output from a function used finditer with a regex pattern to present data from text file. For cities that were blank, there were two dashes like this: “- -“ Those two dashes are being returned for City (?P<city>) since city is blank and that’s the value showing for it in text file. That makes sense; however I need it to pull back only 1 dash.

Example:

When city present in text file, this is returned from my function which is good:

“{‘city’: ‘Boston‘}”

And it is returning “- -“ when city is blank because that is what shows in text file for blank city.

“{‘city’: ‘- -‘}”

However, when city is “- -“ in text file I need “-“ returned instead so it looks like this below:

“{‘city’: ‘- ‘}”

How can I get it to do that?

Does it have to be done from the regex pattern because it is very difficult to get it done there?

Can it be done with additional code to do replacement output of the one dash instead of the two?

Here is example code:

import re

def function( ):

with open(“textfile”,”r”) as file:

test = file.read

s = “”

pattern = r”(?P<city>.whatever pattern etc)”

for item in re.finditer(pattern,test,re.MULTILINE):

s=s+ str(item.groupdict())

return (s)

function()

Answer 1

def function( ):

with open(“textfile”,”r”) as file:

test = file.read

s = “”

pattern = r”(?P<city>.whatever pattern etc)”

for item in re.finditer(pattern,test,re.MULTILINE):

s=s+ str(item.groupdict())

if(s=="{‘city’: ‘- -‘}")

return str("{‘city’: ‘-‘}")

else:

return (s)

function()