Develop Reference

Can anyone help me with what does this part of python code mean?

I would like to know what this small portion of code means, because it seems like in the file that the script creates it adds a line in the end and i believe it might be one of those symbols
opened_file.write("%s\n" %user_input)

It writes a line. The content of user_input replaces the %s (see string interpolation in the docs) and \n is the newline character - after user_input.
Here is a good description of the different "inserting data into strings" methods, including % interpolation (which is now considered outdated):
https://realpython.com/python-string-formatting/

Formatting text that is meant to be replaced

This is a rather generic question, but I have a textfile that I want to edit using a script.
What are some ways to format text, so that it will visually stand out but still be recognized by my script?
It works fine when I use text_to_be_replaced, but it is hard to find when you have a large file.
Tried searching, and it seems that the common ways are:
%text_to_be_replaced%
<text_to_be_replaced>
$(text_to_be_replaced)
But maybe there is a commonly used/widely accepted way to format text for visibility?
The language the script is written in is python, if that matters... but I'm looking for a more-or-less generic soluting which will work 90% of the time.

I'm not aware of any generic standard here, but if it's meant to be replaced, you can use the new string formatting method as follows:
string = 'some text {add_text_here} some more text'
Then to replace it when you need to:
value = 'formatted'
string = string.format(add_text_here=value)
Now print it out:
>>> string
'some text formatted some more text'
In fact, this quite neat at the addition of curly {brackets} around the text that needs to be replaced also may make it stand out a little.

At first I thought that {{curly braces}} would be fine, but than I went with $ALLCAPS.
First of all, caps really stands out, while lowercase may be confused with the rest of the code.
And while it $REALLYSTANDSOUT, it shouldn't cause any problems, since it's just a "bookmark" in a text file, and will be replaced with the appropriate stuff determined by the script.

cleaning the format of the printed data in python

I am trying to compare two lists in python and produce two arrays that contain matching rows and non-matching rows, but the program prints the data in an ugly format. How can I clean I go about cleaning it up?

If you want to read the file without the \n character, you might consider doing the following
lines = list1.readlines()
lines2 = list2.readlines()
would read your file without the "\n" characters
Alternatively, for each line, you can do .strip("\n")

The "ugly format" might be because you are using print(match) (which is actually translated by Python to print ( repr(match) ), printing something that is more useful for debugging or as input back to Python - but not 'nice'.
If you want it printed 'nicely', you'd have to decide what format that would be and write the code for it. In the simplest case, you might do:
for i in match:
print(i)
(note your original list contains \n characters, that's what enumerating an open text file does. They will get printed, as well (together with the `\n' added by print() itself). I don't know if you want them removed or not. See the other answer for possible ways of getting rid of them.

python 3 regex not finding confirmed matches

So I'm trying to parse a bunch of citations from a text file using the re module in python 3.4 (on, if it matters, a mac running mavericks). Here's some minimal code. Note that there are two commented lines: they represent two alternative searches. (Obviously, the little one, r'Rawls', is the one that works)
def makeRefList(reffile):
print(reffile)
# namepattern = r'(^[A-Z1][A-Za-z1]*-?[A-Za-z1]*),.*( \(?\d\d\d\d[a-z]?[.)])'
# namepattern = r'Rawls'
refsTuplesList = re.findall(namepattern, reffile, re.MULTILINE)
print(refsTuplesList)
The string in question is ugly, and so I stuck it in a gist: https://gist.github.com/paultopia/6c48c398a42d4834f2ae
As noted, the search string r'Rawls' produces expected output ['Rawls', 'Rawls']. However, the other search string just produces an empty list.
I've confirmed this regex (partially) works using the regex101 tester. Confirmation here: https://regex101.com/r/kP4nO0/1 -- this match what I expect it to match. Since it works in the tester, it should work in the code, right?
(n.b. I copied the text from terminal output from the first print command, then manually replaced \n characters in the string with carriage returns for regex101.)
One possible issue is that python has appended the bytecode flag (is the little b called a "flag?") to the string. This is an artifact of my attempt to convert the text from utf-8 to ascii, and I haven't figured out how to make it go away.
Yet re clearly is able to parse strings in that form. I know this because I'm converting two text files from utf-8 to ascii, and the following code works perfectly fine on the other string, converted from the other text file, which also has a little b in front of it:
def makeCiteList(citefile):
print(citefile)
citepattern = r'[\s(][A-Z1][A-Za-z1]*-?[A-Za-z1]*[ ,]? \(?\d\d\d\d[a-z]?[\s.,)]'
rawCitelist = re.findall(citepattern, citefile)
cleanCitelist = cleanup(rawCitelist)
finalCiteList = list(set(cleanCitelist))
print(finalCiteList)
return(finalCiteList)
The other chunk of text, which the code immediately above matches correctly: https://gist.github.com/paultopia/a12eba2752638389b2ee
The only hypothesis I can come up with is that the first, broken, regex expression is puking on the combination of newline characters and the string being treated as a byte object, even though a) I know the regex is correct for newlines (because, confirmation from the linked regex101), and b) I know it's matching the strings (because, confirmation from the successful match on the other string).
If that's true, though, I don't know what to do about it.
Thus, questions:
1) Is my hypothesis right that it's the combination of newlines and b that blows up my regex? If not, what is?
2) How do I fix that?
a) replace the newlines with something in the string?
b) rewrite the regex somehow?
c) somehow get rid of that b and make it into a normal string again? (how?)
thanks!
Addition
In case this is a problem I need to fix upstream, here's the code I'm using to get the text files and convert to ascii, replacing non-ascii characters:
this function gets called on utf-8 .txt files saved by textwrangler in mavericks
def makeCorpoi(citefile, reffile):
citebox = open(citefile, 'r')
refbox = open(reffile, 'r')
citecorpus = citebox.read()
refcorpus = refbox.read()
citebox.close()
refbox.close()
corpoi = [str(citecorpus), str(refcorpus)]
return corpoi
and then this function gets called on each element of the list the above function returns.
def conv2ASCII(bigstring):
def convHandler(error):
return ('1FOREIGN', error.start + 1)
codecs.register_error('foreign', convHandler)
bigstring = bigstring.encode('ascii', 'foreign')
stringstring = str(bigstring)
return stringstring

Aah. I've tracked it down and answered my own question. Apparently one needs to call some kind of encode method on the decoded thing. The following code produces an actual string, with newlines and everything, out the other end (though now I have to fix a bunch of other bugs before I can figure out if the final output is as expected):
def conv2ASCII(bigstring):
def convHandler(error):
return ('1FOREIGN', error.start + 1)
codecs.register_error('foreign', convHandler)
bigstring = bigstring.encode('ascii', 'foreign')
newstring = bigstring.decode('ascii', 'foreign')
return newstring
apparently the str() function doesn't do the same job, for reasons that are mysterious to me. This is despite an answer here How to make new line commands work in a .txt file opened from the internet? which suggests that it does.

Python: 2.6 and 3.1 string matching inconsistencies

I wrote my module in Python 3.1.2, but now I have to validate it for 2.6.4.
I'm not going to post all my code since it may cause confusion.
Brief explanation:
I'm writing a XML parser (my first interaction with XML) that creates objects from the XML file. There are a lot of objects, so I have a 'unit test' that manually scans the XML and tries to find a matching object. It will print out anything that doesn't have a match.
I open the XML file and use a simple 'for' loop to read line-by-line through the file. If I match a regular expression for an 'application' (XML has different 'application' nodes), then I add it to my dictionary, d, as the key. I perform a lxml.etree.xpath() query on the title and store it as the value.
After I go through the whole thing, I iterate through my dictionary, d, and try to match the key to my value (I have to use the get() method from my 'application' class). Any time a mismatch is found, I print the key and title.
Python 3.1.2 has all matching items in the dictionary, so nothing is printed. In 2.6.4, every single value is printed (~600) in all. I can't figure out why my string comparisons aren't working.
Without further ado, here's the relevant code:
for i in d:
if i[1:-2] != d[i].get('id'):
print('X%sX Y%sY' % (i[1:-3], d[i].get('id')))
I slice the strings because the strings are different. Where the key would be "9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH"\n the value would be 9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH, so I have to cut the quotes and newline. I also added the Xs and Ys to the print statements to make sure that there wasn't any kind of whitespace issues.
Here is an example line of output:
X9626-2008olympics_Prod-SHX Y9626-2008olympics_Prod-SHY
Remember to ignore the Xs and Ys. Those strings are identical. I don't understand why Python2 can't match them.
Edit:
So the problem seems to be the way that I am slicing.
In Python3,
if i[1:-2] != d[i].get('id'):
this comparison works fine.
In Python2,
if i[1:-3] != d[i].get('id'):
I have to change the offset by one.
Why would strings need different offsets? The only possible thing that I can think of is that Python2 treats a newline as two characters (i.e. '\' + 'n').
Edit 2:
Updated with requested repr() information.
I added a small amount of code to produce the repr() info from the "2008olympics" exmpale above. I have not done any slicing. It actually looks like it might not be a unicode issue. There is now a "\r" character.
Python2:
'"9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH"\r\n'
'9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH'
Python3:
'"9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH"\n'
'9626-2008olympics_Prod-SH'
Looks like this file was created/modified on Windows. Is there a way in Python2 to automatically suppress '\r'?

You are printing i[1:-3] but comparing i[1:-2] in the loop.
Very Important Question
Why are you writing code to parse XML when lxml will do all that for you? The point of unit tests is to test your code, not to ensure that the libraries you are using work!

Russell Borogrove is right.
Python 3 defaults to unicode, and the newline character is correctly interpreted as one character. That's why my offset of [1:-2] worked in 3 because I needed to eliminate three characters: ", ", and \n.
In Python 2, the newline is being interpreted as two characters, meaning I have to eliminate four characters and use [1:-3].
I just added a manual check for the Python major version.
Here is the fixed code:
for i in d:
# The keys in D contain quotes and a newline which need
# to be removed. In v3, newline = 1 char and in v2,
# newline = 2 char.
if sys.version_info[0] < 3:
if i[1:-3] != d[i].get('id'):
print('%s %s' % (i[1:-3], d[i].get('id')))
else:
if i[1:-2] != d[i].get('id'):
print('%s %s' % (i[1:-2], d[i].get('id')))
Thanks for the responses everyone! I appreciate your help.

repr() and %r format are your friends ... they show you (for basic types like str/unicode/bytes) exactly what you've got, including type.
Instead of
print('X%sX Y%sY' % (i[1:-3], d[i].get('id')))
do
print('%r %r' % (i, d[i].get('id')))
Note leaving off the [1:-3] so that you can see what is in i before you slice it.
Update after comment "You are perfectly right about comparing the wrong slice. However, once I change it, python2.6 works, but python3 has the problem now (i.e. it doesn't match any objects)":
How are you opening the file (two answers please, for Python 2 and 3). Are you running on Windows? Have you tried getting the repr() as I suggested?
Update after actual input finally provided by OP:
If, as it appears, your input file was created on Windows (lines are separated by "\r\n"), you can read Windows and *x text files portably by using the "universal newlines" option ... open('datafile.txt', 'rU') on Python2 -- read this. Universal newlines mode is the default in Python3. Note that the Python3 docs say that you can use 'rU' also in Python3; this would save you having to test which Python version you are using.

I don't understand what you're doing exactly, but would you try using strip() instead of slicing and see whether it helps?
for i in d:
stripped = i.strip()
if stripped != d[i].get('id'):
print('X%sX Y%sY' % (stripped, d[i].get('id')))