splitting file into multiple files by searching for string

[AlphaInc]

Hello everybody,

I got a backup of a bunch of chess games (from chess.com) I played with a friend of mine and wanted to save them as individual files. Now I only have a complete file with all games but I noticed, that every individual game begins with the string "[Event "Let's Play!"]".

Now I want to create a python script which checks for the string and saves everything to a file until the string occurs again, but I'm not sure how to do so. I thought of using a for-loop which looks for the string, saves everything to a file (with increasing counter) until the string comes again and the loop repeats.

My first problem is, how take only the "difference" between the string?

[deanhystad]

Look to see if the line from the file starts with (hint hint) "[Event "Let's Play!"]".
The logic would be something like this:

Output:
output file = None
open input file
for line in file
    if line starts with "[Event "Let's Play!"]"
        if output file
            close output file
        open new output file
    if output file
        write line to output file
close input file
close output file

There are also command line tools that will do the job, like awk.

[Pedroski55]

How big is the file with all the games?

You could just load the whole string, split on [Event "Let's Play!"], then you have a list of strings of individual games.

In Python you would need to replace Let's with Let\'s first to escape the apostrophe. ctrl h in a text editor, if you have a text file, quick and easy.

Then take each element in the list and write it to a file, except if it is an empty string.

games = data.split('[Event "Let\'s Play!"]')

Just a suggestion!