Extracting information from txt file using python

Python allows you to read a file using the built-in open() function

https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#open

you can then read though the file line-by-line via a for loop:

file = open("some_file.txt", 'r')
for line in file:
  ...

in order to format the data like you want, you'll have to use some of python's string formatting functions, namely:

columns = line.split("|")

which will get you a list of all the strings between the | characters, so the first element of the first line would be:

ETP 474654 0

if you want to get rid of the multiple spaces, you can do

line = " ".join(line.split()) before splitting it, which will break the entire line into individual words, and then rejoin them into a single string with only a single space between each of the words

you appear to have an extra column in the first row, so you can get rid of that by doing

first_column = columns[0].split(" ")

to split the three elements in that column apart, and then put them back into the array as

columns[0] = first_column[0] + " " + first_column[1]

to get rid of the unwanted third item

then to combine the rest of the columns you can just use a loop to append to a string

output_string = ""
for column in columns:
    if (column == ""):
        continue
    output_string += column + " | "

plus

output_string = output_string.rstrip(" |")

to get rid of the extra " | " you would have at the end, which will leave you with something like your example output with the non-formatted dates

First, sorry if I'm being overly redundant in my answer, but taking into account this part of your question:

I am new to python and would like to know if this is possible and if someone could point me in the right direccion to solve this. Thanks for the help.

I'll assume you're a beginner and suggest a tool that may come in handy.

I recommend you take a look at the Pandas library, especially in the documentation and basic examples to get started. If you don't have it previously installed in your python package, just run in the (base) terminal the command: pip install pandas

the main idea then is to create a data frame so you can edit and work on it during your script. You can run then

import pandas as pd

data_frame = pd.read_csv('yout-file-name.txt') 

To open your file and create your data frame. From there, you can study some parameters of your data frame with the following commands:

print(data.shape)

to see the sizes of your file or

print(data.head(n=5))

to visualize the first lines of it. With this organized data frame in hand, there are several functions within Pandas to edit your content as desired, my main suggestion for you would be to transpose your data using

data_frame = data_frame.transpose()

and then run a loop to select just the ETP columns and edit your third line -after selecting the ETP's columns you can also transpose the data again to go back to working on column dates -(which you mentioned is relative to the date) to the desired format just by writing the "/" beetwen the numbers like the mechanism suggested here.

I hope this tool will be of some help in your work!