How to read a particular column from popen output in Python

Question

I am running this command gcloud compute regions list to fetch the list of region in my GCP. It return output like below,

NAME            CPUS     DISKS_GB   
asia-east1      0/600    0/102400  
asia-east2      0/600    0/102400  

I just want to read the first column 'NAME' and store it in a list wihtout using pandas.

My code is as follow,

def get_process_cmd_output(cmd):
    try:
        p1 = Popen([cmd], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, shell=True)
        (output, err) = p1.communicate()
        return output.decode('UTF-8')
    except:
        return None


get_regions_list = 'gcloud compute regions list'
get_regions_response = get_process_cmd_output(get_regions_list)
print(get_regions_response)

Answer 1

Use splitlines() to split the output into lines. Then split each line to get a particular column.

for line in get_region_response.splitlines():
    fields = line.split()
    print(fields[0])

to get it into a list, use a list comprehension:

names = [line.split()[0] for line in get_region_response.splitlines()[1:]]

[1:] is to skip over the header line.