Python-Delete anything in quotes from line in text file

Question

I'm trying to remove any text inside of quotation marks (and the quotation marks themselves) from a file.

Basically I need this:

A A2A|"Dm"A2A "C"G2E|"Dm"D2D A,2D|

To turn into this:

A A2A|A2A G2E|D2D A,2D|

Here's a code snippet of what I originally tried:

def conversion():
    with open(abc + .'txt') as infile, open(abc + '.tmp', 'w') as outfile:
        for line in infile:
            #Delete anything inside of quotes after the header
            if '"' + '' in line:
                line = line.replace('"' + '', '')
                outfile.write(line)

            #Write everything else 
            else:
                outfile.write(line)
conversion()

This removes the quotation marks, but it leaves everything that was inside of them.

If I change

line = line.replace('"' +'','')

To

line = line.replace('"' + "Dm" + '"', '')

I can get rid of anything containing "Dm", theoretically I could program this for each possible combination, but that would be a huge PITA and I want to allow for human error (e.g. Someone wrote "Dma" instead of "Dmaj").

I've also tried using regex, but I honestly have no idea what I'm doing with it.

def conversion():
    with open(abc + '.txt') as infile, open(abc + '.tmp', 'w') as outfile:
        for line in infile:
            #Delete anything inside of quotes after the header
            if '"' in line:
                re.sub('".+"', '', line)
                outfile.write(line)

            #Write everything else 
            else:
                outfile.write(line)
conversion()

This seems to do nothing, I've looked through the python documentation, but there's no example to show how to use it in the context I'm trying to.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

3

re.sub() returns the edited line, it doesn't edit in-place.

line = re.sub('".*?"', '', line)
outfile.write(line)

And your regex would match across quotes, so I edited it to make it non-greedy.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

Community

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answered Sep 17 '15 at 00:21

TessellatingHeckler

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Thank you, if you don't mind another question, does it matter whether you use * or + in re.sub() ? – Noah Wood Sep 17 '15 at 00:39
Yes it matters; `.*` matches "none or more characters", and `.+` matches "one or more characters". So `".*"` will match an empty pair of quotes (`""`), whereas `".+"` will not match empty quotes, it needs to have at least one character inside the quotes. – TessellatingHeckler Sep 17 '15 at 01:17

Python-Delete anything in quotes from line in text file

1 Answers1