In a recent interview I was asked to write a small Python program to parse a file. The file had the following format:
line
line
line
START-METADATA
FIELD1
FIELD2
FIELD3
END-METADATA
blah
blah
START-RESULTSET
Item1|Item2|Item3|Item4...
.....
...
END-RESULTSET

My Job was to parse the file, print all metadata fields on one line as header and then print the result set.

I had never used Python and my interviewer knew that. I guess they wanted to see how I approach the problem.

So I started thinking in Perl , which I have used before, and with some help from the interviewer and some on-line help, I collected the metadata in an array using the for loop and if statements.

Needless to say, I did not get the job. Unfortunately, I did not get any feed back also. So, I wanted to know how many ways there are to parse a file in Python. Since this was an interview I assumed I wouldn't get more than an hour to write the program and coming from a C/Java background I am wondering how should I have written the program.