Reading vcf file data using python and re library

Often time when debugging it is useful to use print at various points to figure out where the code is going awry. If you inserted print(">",nm,tel) after tel = ''.join(tel), for example, you should get the following output:

>  
>  
>  
> Muller 
>  
>  
>  
>  +16829185770
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> Mraz 
>  
[... continued...]

Obviously, this is because your for loop is operating on each line in the file instead of each card (technically, you even acknowledge this: for line in file:).

You may be interested in using a module for parsing this file (a quick google brought up the vobject package), which would eliminate the need for re. If you’re feeling ambitious you may be able to parse it manually (not really familiar with the format, so here’s an off-the-cuff example).

CARDMATCHER = re.compile(r"""
^                 ## Match at Start of Line (Multiline-flag)
    BEGIN:VCARD   ## Match the string "BEGIN:VCARD" exactly
$                 ## Match the End of Line (Multiline-flag)
.*?               ## Match characters (.) any number of times(*),
                  ## as few times as possible(?), including new-line(Dotall-flag)
^                 ## Match at Start of Line (Multiline-flag)
    END:VCARD     ## Match the string "END:VCARD" exactly
$                 ## Match the End of Line (Multiline-flag)
""", re.MULTILINE|re.DOTALL|re.VERBOSE)

VALUERE = re.compile("""
^(?P<type>[A-Z]+) ## Match Capital Ascii Characters at Start of Line
(?P<sep>:|;)     ## Match a colon or a semicolon
(?P<value>.*)    ## Match all other characters remaining
""", re.VERBOSE)

class MyVCard():
    def __init__(self,cardstring):
        self.info = defaultdict(list)
        ## Iterate over the card like you were doing
        for line in cardstring.split("n"):
            ## Split Key of line
            match = VALUERE.match(line)
            if match:
                vtype = match.group("type")
                ## Line Values are separated by semicolons
                values = match.group("value").split(";")

                ## Lines with colons appear to be unique values
                if match.group("sep") == ":":
                    ## If only a single value, we don't need the list
                    if len(values) == 1:
                        self.info[vtype] = values[0]
                    else:
                        self.info[vtype] = values

                ## Otherwise (Semicolon sep), the value may not be unique
                else:
                    ## Semicolon seps also appear to have multiple keys
                    ## So we'll use a dict
                    out = {}
                    for val in values:
                        ## Get key,value for each value
                        k,v = val.split("=",maxsplit=1)
                        out[k] = v
                    ## Make sure we havea list to append to
                    self.info[vtype].append(out)
    def get_a_number(self):
        """ Naive approach to getting the number """
        if "TEL" in self.info:
            number = self.info["TEL"][0]["VALUE"]
            numbers = re.findall("tel:(.+)",number)
            if numbers:
                return numbers[0]
        return None

def get_vcards(file):
    """ Use regex to parse VCards into dicts. """
    with open(file,'r') as f:
        finput = f.read()
    cards = CARDMATCHER.findall(finput)
    return [MyVCard(card) for card in cards]

print([{"fn":card.info['FN'], "tel":card.get_a_number()} for card in get_vcards(file)])

Again, I make no guarantees on this code since I’m not going to look up all the specifications for the vcf format, and would recommend using a module specifically designed for this instead.

Try the below code

import re
import json

from typing import List, Any


def get_contacts_from_vcf(filename: str) -> List[Any]:
    contacts = []
    with open(filename, 'r') as f:
        ln = ''.join(f.readlines())

    raw_data = ln.split("END:VCARD")

    for x in raw_data:
        s = re.search("FN:(.*)", x)
        fn = re.findall("TEL;(.*)", x)
        fn = [b_.strip() for b_ in fn]

        if s is not None and len(fn) >= 1:
            name = s.groups()[-1].strip()
            for num in fn:
                num_count = fn.count(num)
                if num_count > 1:
                    for n in range(1, num_count):
                        fn.remove(num)

            numbers = []
            for fn in fn:
                numbers.append(fn.split(':')[-1])
            tel = ', '.join(numbers)

            data = {
                "name": name,
                "Ph No(s)": tel
            }
            contacts.append(json.dumps(data) + ",")

    return contacts


print('n'.join(get_contacts_from_vcf("bin.vcf")))

Output:

{"name": "John", "Ph No(s)": "1234, 4321"},
{"name": "watt", "Ph No(s)": "121, 32444"},
{"name": "smith", "Ph No(s)": "55555"},