read a file into python and remove values
Question: I have the following code that reads in a file and stores the values into a
list. It also reads each line of the file and if it sees a '(' in the file it
splits it and everything that follows it on the line.

    
    
    with open('filename', 'r') as f: 
        list1 = [line.strip().split('(')[0].split() for line in f]
    

Is there a way that I can change this to split not only at a '(' but also at a
'#'?


Answer: Use [re.split](http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#re.split).

With a sample of your data's format, it may be possible to do better than
this, but without context we can still show how to use this with the code you
have provided.

To use re.split():

    
    
    import re
    with open('filename', 'r') as f:
        list1 = [re.split('[(#]+', line.strip())[0].split() for line in f]
    

Notice that the first parameter in re.split() is a regular expression to split
on, and the second parameter is the string to apply this operation to.

General idea from: [Splitting a string with multiple delimiters in
Python](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10393157/splitting-a-string-with-
multiple-delimiters-in-python)

