parse, find chapters, and write out as separate files

Question

I am having difficulty getting the right code to parse out chapters from this ebook and then have the 27 chapters to print out into their own text file. the farthest i've gotten is to print "CHAPTER-1.txt". I don't want to hard code anything and am unsure where i've completely missed the mark.

infile = open('dracula.txt', 'r')

readlines = infile.readlines()

toc_list = readlines[74:185]

toc_text_lines = []
for line in toc_list:
    if len(line) > 1:
    stripped_line = line.strip()
    toc_text_lines.append(stripped_line)

#print(len(toc_text_lines))

chaptitles = []
for text_lines in toc_text_lines:
    split_text_line = text_lines.split()
    if split_text_line[-1].isdigit():
    chaptitles.append(text_lines)

#print(len(chaptitles))
print(chaptitles)

infile.close()

import re

with open('dracula.txt') as f:
   book = f.readlines()



while book:
    line = book.pop(0)
if "CHAPTER" in line and book.pop(0) == '\n':
    for title in chapters_names_list: ['CHAPTER I.', 'CHAPTER II.', 
                                                     'CHAPTER III.']
with open("{}.txt".format(chapters_names_list), 'w') :

Answer 1

I think you could benefit from generators, suppose one of the ebooks is too big to fit into memory, you will have some issues.

What you can do is construct sort of a data processing pipeline, first look for the file(ebook.txt) in the filesystem, though have in mind that we need all functions to be as general as possible, once we have the filename we open it and yield one line at a time, and finally we scan each line for 'CHAPTER I.', 'CHAPTER II.', etc

import os
import re
import fnmatch

def find_files(pattern, path):
    """
    Here you can find all the filenames that match a specific pattern
    using shell wildcard pattern that way you avoid hardcoding
    the file pattern i.e 'dracula.txt'
    """
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path):
        for name in fnmatch.filter(files, pattern):
            yield os.path.join(root, name)

def file_opener(filenames):
    """
    Open a sequence of filenames one at a time
    and make sure to close the file once we are done 
    scanning its content.
    """
    for filename in filenames:
        if filename.endswith('.txt'):
            f = open(filename, 'rt')
        yield f
        f.close()

def chain_generators(iterators):
    """
    Chain a sequence of iterators together
    """
    for it in iterators:
        # Look up yield from if you're unsure what it does
        yield from it

def grep(pattern, lines):
    """
    Look for a pattern in a line i.e 'CHAPTER I.'
    """
    pat = re.compile(pattern)
    for line in lines:
        if pat.search(line):
            yield line

# A simple way to use these functions together

logs = find_files('dracula*', 'Path/to/files')
files = file_opener(logs)
lines = chain_generators(files)
each_line = grep('CHAPTER I.', lines)
for match in each_line:
    print(match)

You can build on top of these implementation to accomplish what you're trying to do.

Let me know if this helped.