text processing - Python: How to loop through blocks of lines

Question

How to go through blocks of lines separated by an empty line? The file looks like the following:

ID: 1
Name: X
FamilyN: Y
Age: 20

ID: 2
Name: H
FamilyN: F
Age: 23

ID: 3
Name: S
FamilyN: Y
Age: 13

ID: 4
Name: M
FamilyN: Z
Age: 25

I want to loop through the blocks and grab the fields Name, Family name and Age in a list of 3 columns:

Y X 20
F H 23
Y S 13
Z M 25

Answer 1

Here's another way, using itertools.groupby. The function groupy iterates through lines of the file and calls isa_group_separator(line) for each line. isa_group_separator returns either True or False (called the key), and itertools.groupby then groups all the consecutive lines that yielded the same True or False result.

This is a very convenient way to collect lines into groups.

import itertools

def isa_group_separator(line):
    return line=='
'

with open('data_file') as f:
    for key,group in itertools.groupby(f,isa_group_separator):
        # print(key,list(group))  # uncomment to see what itertools.groupby does.
        if not key:
            data={}
            for item in group:
                field,value=item.split(':')
                value=value.strip()
                data[field]=value
            print('{FamilyN} {Name} {Age}'.format(**data))

# Y X 20
# F H 23
# Y S 13
# Z M 25