python advance for loop

Question

I am an old dog who used BASIC > 30 years ago. I have run into this scenario in using for loops in python before, but I picked this illustration for my concern about loops:

I would like to parse a long string which includes words in double quotes separated by commas. I can ignore double quotes, but I want the loop to advance here. I don't feel like this is very elegant. I am carrying unnecessary looping baggage. Should I do away with the loop altogether, in which case, is slicing the preferred method, and is there a general rule to apply to the question of using loops or not?

"""
data is the str-type variable
line, despite the name, seems to pull out just one character at a time
(which is not relevant except to confirm my naïveté in python)
"""

for line in data:
    if line.endswith('"'):
        x = True  # doing nothing but advancing the for loop
    elif line.endswith(','):
        #  do something at a comma
    else:
        #  continue the parsing

Edit Example string:

"All","the","world","'s","a","stage","And","all","the","men","and","women","merely","players"

Answer 1

I would like to parse a long string which includes words in double quotes separated by commas

Let data be

data = '''"this","is","a","test"'''

Then you can split() on commas

for quote in data.split(','):

I can ignore double quotes

Yes, you can strip() the quotes

    word = quote.strip('"')

Then print

    print(word)

---

All together

data = '''"this","is","a","test"'''

for quote in data.split(','):
    word = quote.strip('"')
    print(word)

Outputs

this
is
a
test

Answer 2

For your general questions about loops, if you want to parse the string line by line, you can do either:

for line in data.split('\n'):
    …

or

for line in data.splitlines():
    …

… long string which includes words in double quotes separated by commas. I can ignore double quotes, but I want the loop to advance here …

But after reading your question several times, you never said you actually want to iterate over lines. Instead, you might want to split your strings at the comma:

for element in data.split(','):
    …

and then, if you want to remove the quotes, you can strip them out:

    element.strip('"\'')

edit:

here's a go with your example, to extract each word:

>>> s = '''"All","the","world","'s","a","stage","And","all","the","men","and","women","merely","players"'''
>>> 
>>> for element in s.split(','):
...     element = element.strip('"')
...     print(element)
... 
All
the
world
's
a
stage
And
all
the
men
and
women
merely
players

HTH

Answer 3

Since data is str the for loop will advance one character at a time. If you want to split the str to lines separated by newline character you can do so by split method that returns a list of lines:

for line in data.split('\n'):
    # do something with line