I want to find the lines which start with a word of a list. If the word is found i want the line it stands in and the previous line to be deleted. I am able to get the line and the previos one and print them but i can not get my head around not to pass them to my outputfile. F.e.:
in-put:
This is not supposed to be deleted.
This shall be deleted.
Titel
This is not supposed to be deleted.
This is not supposed to be deleted
out-put:
This is not supposed to be deleted.
This is not supposed to be deleted.
This is not supposed to be deleted
I tried it with this code, but i keep getting a TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
with open(file1) as f_in, open(file2, 'w') as f_out:
lines = f_in.read().splitlines()
for i, line in enumerate(lines):
clean = True
if line.startswith(('Text', 'Titel')):
for (line[i-1]) in lines:
clean = False
for line in lines:
clean =False
if clean == True:
f_out.write(line)
First keep track of which lines you want to copy:
lines_to_keep = []
with open(file1) as f_in:
deleted_previous_line = True
for line in f_in:
if line.startswith(('Text', 'Titel')):
if not deleted_previous_line:
del lines_to_keep[-1]
deleted_previous_line = True
continue
deleted_previous_line = False
lines_to_keep.append(line)
The trick with the deleted_previous_line
is necessary to ensure it does not delete too many lines if consecutive lines start with 'Text' or 'Titel'.
Then write it to your output file
with open(file2, 'w') as f_out:
f_out.writelines(lines_to_keep)