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Extract time values from a list and add to a new list or array

I have a script that reads through a log file that contains hundreds of these logs, and looks for the ones that have a "On, Off, or Switch" type. Then I output each log into its own list. I'm trying to find a way to extract the Out and In times into a separate list/array and then subtract the two times to find the duration of each separate log. This is what the outputted logs look like:
['2020-01-31T12:04:57.976Z 1234 Out: [2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z] Id: {"Id":"4-f-4-9-6a"', '"Type":"Switch"', '"In":"2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z"']
This is my current code:
logfile = '/path/to/my/logfile'
with open(logfile, 'r') as f:
text = f.read()
words = ["On", "Off", "Switch"]
text2 = text.split('\n')
for l in text.split('\n'):
if (words[0] in l or words[1] in l or words[2] in l):
log = l.split(',')[0:3]
I'm stuck on how to target only the Out and In time values from the logs and put them in an array and convert to a time value to find duration.
Initial log before script: everything after the "In" time is useless for what I'm looking for so I only have the first three indices outputted
2020-01-31T12:04:57.976Z 1234 Out: [2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z] Id: {"Id":"4-f-4-9-6a","Type":"Switch,"In":"2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z","Path":"interface","message":"interface changed status from unknown to normal","severity":"INFORMATIONAL","display":true,"json_map":"{\"severity\":null,\"eventId\":\"65e-64d9-45-ab62-8ef98ac5e60d\",\"componentPath\":\"interface_css\",\"displayToGui\":false,\"originalState\":\"unknown\",\"closed\":false,\"eventType\":\"InterfaceStateChange\",\"time\":\"2019-04-18T07:04:32.747Z\",\"json_map\":null,\"message\":\"interface_css changed status from unknown to normal\",\"newState\":\"normal\",\"info\":\"Event created with current status\"}","closed":false,"info":"Event created with current status","originalState":"unknown","newState":"normal"}

Below is a possible solution. The wordmatch line is a bit of a hack, until I find something clearer: it's just a one-liner that create an empty or 1-element set of True if one of the words matches.
(Untested)
import re
logfile = '/path/to/my/logfile'
words = ["On", "Off", "Switch"]
dateformat = r'\d{4}\-\d{2}\-\d{2}T\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\.\d+[Zz]?'
pattern = fr'Out:\s*\[(?P<out>{dateformat})\].*In":\s*\"(?P<in>{dateformat})\"'
regex = re.compile(pattern)
with open(logfile, 'r') as f:
for line in f:
wordmatch = set(filter(None, (word in s for word in words)))
if wordmatch:
match = regex.search(line)
if match:
intime = match.group('in')
outtime = match.group('out')
# whatever to store these strings, e.g., append to list or insert in a dict.
As noted, your log example is very awkward, so this works for the example line, but may not work for every line. Adjust as necessary.
I have also not included (if so wanted), a conversion to a datetime.datetime object. For that, read through the datetime module documentation, in particular datetime.strptime. (Alternatively, you may want to store your results in a Pandas table. In that case, read through the Pandas documentation on how to convert strings to actual datetime objects.)
You also don't need to read nad split on newlines yourself: for line in f will do that for you (provided f is indeed a filehandle).

Regex is probably the way to go (fastness, efficiency etc.) ... but ...
You could take a very simplistic (if very inefficient) approach of cleaning your data:
join all of it into a string
replace things that hinder easy parsing
split wisely and filter the split
like so:
data = ['2020-01-31T12:04:57.976Z 1234 Out: [2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z] Id: {"Id":"4-f-4-9-6a"', '"Type":"Switch"', '"In":"2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z"']
all_text = " ".join(data)
# this is inefficient and will create throwaway intermediate strings - if you are
# in a hurry or operate on 100s of MB of data, this is NOT the way to go, unless
# you have time
# iterate pairs of ("bad thing", "what to replace it with") (or list of bad things)
for thing in [ (": ",":"), (list('[]{}"'),"") ]:
whatt = thing[0]
withh = thing[1]
# if list, do so for each bad thing
if isinstance(whatt, list):
for p in whatt:
# replace it
all_text = all_text.replace(p,withh)
else:
all_text = all_text.replace(whatt,withh)
# format is now far better suited to splitting/filtering
cleaned = [a for a in all_text.split(" ")
if any(a.startswith(prefix) or "Switch" in a
for prefix in {"In:","Switch:","Out:"})]
print(cleaned)
Outputs:
['Out:2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z', 'Type:Switch', 'In:2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z']
After cleaning your data would look like:
2020-01-31T12:04:57.976Z 1234 Out:2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z Id:Id:4-f-4-9-6a Type:Switch In:2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z
You can transform the clean list into a dictionary for ease of lookup:
d = dict( part.split(":",1) for part in cleaned)
print(d)
will produce:
{'In': '2020-01-31T00:30:20.140Z',
'Type': 'Switch',
'Out': '2020-01-31T00:30:20.150Z'}
You can use datetime module to parse the times from your values as shown in 0 0 post.

In Python, how to match a string to a dictionary item (like 'Bra*')

I'm a complete novice at Python so please excuse me for asking something stupid.
From a textfile a dictionary is made to be used as a pass/block filter.
The textfile contains addresses and either a block or allow like "002029568,allow" or "0011*,allow" (without the quotes).
The search-input is a string with a complete code like "001180000".
How can I evaluate if the search-item is in the dictionary and make it match the "0011*,allow" line?
Thank you very much for your efford!
The filter-dictionary is made with:
def loadFilterDict(filename):
global filterDict
try:
with open(filename, "r") as text_file:
lines = text_file.readlines()
for s in lines:
fields = s.split(',')
if len(fields) == 2:
filterDict[fields[0]] = fields[1].strip()
text_file.close()
except:
pass
Check if the code (ccode) is in the dictionary:
if ccode in filterDict:
if filterDict[ccode] in ['block']:
continue
else:
if filterstat in ['block']:
continue
The filters-file is like:
002029568,allow
000923993,allow
0011*, allow

If you can use re, you don't have to worry about the wildcard but let re.match do the hard work for you:
# Rules input (this could also be read from file)
lines = """002029568,allow
0011*,allow
001180001,block
"""
# Parse rules from string
rules = []
for line in lines.split("\n"):
line = line.strip()
if not line:
continue
identifier, ruling = line.split(",")
rules += [(identifier, ruling)]
# Get rulings for specific number
def rule(number):
from re import match
rulings = []
for identifier, ruling in rules:
# Replace wildcard with regex .*
identifier = identifier.replace("*", ".*")
if match(identifier, number):
rulings += [ruling]
return rulings
print(rule("001180000"))
print(rule("001180001"))
Which prints:
['allow']
['allow', 'block']
The function will return a list of rulings. Their order is the same order as they appear in your config lines. So you could easily just pick the last or first ruling whichever is the one you're interested in.
Or break the loop prematurely if you can assume that no two rulings will interfere.
Examples:
001180000 is matched by 0011*,allow only, so the only ruling which applies is allow.
001180001 is matched by 0011*,allow at first, so you'll get allow as before. However, it is also matched by 001180001,block, so a block will get added to the rulings, too.

If the wildcard entries in the file have a fixed length (for example, you only need to support lines like 0011*,allow and not 00110*,allow or 0*,allow or any other arbitrary number of digits followed by *) you can use a nested dictionary, where the outer keys are the known parts of the wildcarded entries.
d = {'0011': {'001180000': 'value', '001180001': 'value'}}
Then when you parse the file and get to the line 0011*,allow you do not need to do any matching. All you have to do is check if '0011' is present. Crude example:
d = {'0011': {'001180000': 'value', '001180001': 'value'}}
line = '0011*,allow'
prefix = line.split(',')[0][:-1]
if prefix in d:
# there is a "match", then you can deal with all the entries that match,
# in this case the items in the inner dictionary
# {'001180000': 'value', '001180001': 'value'}
print('match')
else:
print('no match')
If you do need to support arbitrary lengths of wildcarded entries, you will have to resort to a loop iterating over the dictionary (and therefore beating the point of using a dictionary to begin with):
d = {'001180000': 'value', '001180001': 'value'}
line = '0011*,allow'
prefix = line.split(',')[0][:-1]
for k, v in d.items():
if k.startswith(prefix):
# found matching key-value pair
print(k, v)

Trying to split a txt file into multiple variables

So I'm making a program where it reads a text file and I need to separate all the info into their own variables. It looks like this:
>1EK9:A.41,52; B.61,74; C.247,257; D.279,289
ENLMQVYQQARLSNPELRKSAADRDAAFEKINEARSPLLPQLGLGAD
YTYSNGYRDANGINSNATSASLQLTQSIFDMSKWRALTLQEKAAGIQ
DVTYQTDQQTLILNTATAYFNVLNAIDVLSYTQAQKEAIYRQLDQTT
QRFNVGLVAITDVQNARAQYDTVLANEVTARNNLDNAVEQLRQITGN
YYPELAALNVENFKTDKPQPVNALLKEAEKRNLSLLQARLSQDLARE
QIRQAQDGHLPTLDLTASTGISDTSYSGSKTRGAAGTQYDDSNMGQN
KVGLSFSLPIYQGGMVNSQVKQAQYNFVGASEQLESAHRSVVQTVRS
SFNNINASISSINAYKQAVVSAQSSLDAMEAGYSVGTRTIVDVLDAT
TTLYNAKQELANARYNYLINQLNIKSALGTLNEQDLLALNNALSKPV
STNPENVAPQTPEQNAIADGYAPDSPAPVVQQTSARTTTSNGHNPFRN
The code after the > is a title, the next bit that looks like this "A.41,52" are numbered positions in the sequence I need to save to use, and everything after that is an amino acid sequence. I know how to deal with the amino acid sequence, I just need to know how to separate the important numbers in the first line.
In the past when I just had a title and sequence I did something like this:
for line in nucfile:
if line.startswith(">"):
headerline=line.strip("\n")[1:]
else:
nucseq+=line.strip("\n")
Am I on the right track here? This is my first time, any advice would be fantastic and thanks for reading :)

I suggest you use the split() method.
split() allows you to specify the separator of your choice. Provided the sequence title (here 1EK9) is always separated from the rest of the sequence by a colon, you could first pass ":" as your separator. You could then split the remainder of the sequence to recover the numbered positions (e.g. A.41,52) using ";" as a separator.
I hope this helps!

I think what you are trying to do is extract certain parts of the sequence based on their identifiers given to you on the first line (the line starting with >).
This line contains your title, then a sequence name and the data range you need to extract.
Try this:
sequence_pairs = {}
with open('somefile.txt') as f:
header_line = next(f)
sequence = f.read()
title,components = header_line.split(':')
pairs = components.split(';')
for pair in pairs:
start,end = pair[2:-1].split(',')
sequence_pars[pair[:1]] = sequence[start:int(end)+1]
for sequence,data in sequence_pairs.iteritems():
print('{} - {}'.format(sequence, data))

As the other answer may be very good to tackle the assumed problem in it's entirety - but the OP has requested for pointers or an example of the tpyical split-unsplit transform which is often so successful I hereby provide some ideas and working code to show this (based on the example of the question).
So let us focus on the else branch below:
from __future__ import print_function
nuc_seq = [] # a list
title_token = '>'
with open('some_file_of_a_kind.txt', 'rt') as f:
for line in f.readlines():
s_line = line.strip() # this strips whitespace
if line.startswith(title_token):
headerline = line.strip("\n")[1:]
else:
nuc_seq.append(s_line) # build list
# now nuc_seq is a list of strings like:
# ['ENLMQVYQQARLSNPELRKSAADRDAAFEKINEARSPLLPQLGLGAD',
# 'YTYSNGYRDANGINSNATSASLQLTQSIFDMSKWRALTLQEKAAGIQ',
# ...
# ]
demo_nuc_str = ''.join(nuc_seq)
# now:
# demo_nuc_str == 'ENLMQVYQQARLSNPELRKSAADRDAAFEKINEARSPLLPQLGLGADYTYSNGYR ...'
That is fast and widely deployed paradigm in Python programming (and programming with powerful datatypes in general).
If the split-unsplit ( a.k.a. join) method is still unclear, just ask or try to sear SO on excellent answers to related questions.
Also note, that there is no need to line.strip('\n') as \nis considered whitespace like ' ' (string with a space only) or a tabulator '\t', sample:
>>> a = ' \t \n '
>>> '+'.join(a.split())
''
So the "joining character" only appears, if there are at least two element sto join and in this case, strip removed all whits space and left us with the empty string.
Upate:
As requested a further analysis of the "coordinate part" in the line called headline of the question:
>1EK9:A.41,52; B.61,74; C.247,257; D.279,289
If you want to retrieve the:
A.41,52; B.61,74; C.247,257; D.279,289
and assume you have (as above the complete line in headline string):
title, coordinate_string = headline.split(':')
# so now title is '1EK9' and
# coordinates == 'A.41,52; B.61,74; C.247,257; D.279,289'
Now split on the semi colons, trim the entries:
het_seq = [z.strip() for z in coordinates.split(';')]
# now het_seq == ['A.41,52', 'B.61,74', 'C.247,257', 'D.279,289']
If 'a', 'B', 'C', and 'D' are well known dimensions, than you can "lose" the ordering info from input file (as you could always reinforce what you already know ;-) and might map the coordinats as key: (ordered coordinate-pair):
>>> coord_map = dict(
(a, tuple(int(k) for k in bc.split(',')))
for a, bc in (abc.split('.') for abc in het_seq))
>>> coord_map
{'A': (41, 52), 'C': (247, 257), 'B': (61, 74), 'D': (279, 289)}
In context of a micro program:
#! /usr/bin/enc python
from __future__ import print_function
het_seq = ['A.41,52', 'B.61,74', 'C.247,257', 'D.279,289']
coord_map = dict(
(a, tuple(int(k) for k in bc.split(',')))
for a, bc in (abc.split('.') for abc in het_seq))
print(coord_map)
yields:
{'A': (41, 52), 'C': (247, 257), 'B': (61, 74), 'D': (279, 289)}
Here one might write this explicit a nested for loop but it is a late european evening so trick is to read it from right:
for all elements of het_seq
split on the dot and store left in a and right in b
than further split the bc into a sequence of k's, convert to integer and put into tuple (ordered pair of integer coordinates)
arrived on the left you build a tuple of the a ("The dimension like 'A' and the coordinate tuple from 3.
In the end call the dict() function that constructs a dictionary using here the form dict(key_1, value_1, hey_2, value_2, ...) which gives {key_1: value1, ...}
So all coordinates are integers, stored ordered pairs as tuples.
I'ld prefer tuples here, although split() generates lists, because
You will keep those two coordinates not extend or append that pair
In python mapping and remapping is often performed and there a hashable (that is immutable type) is ready to become a key in a dict.
One last variant (with no knoted comprehensions):
coord_map = {}
for abc in het_seq:
a, bc = abc.split('.')
coord_map[a] = tuple(int(k) for k in bc.split(','))
print(coord_map)
The first four lines produce the same as above minor obnoxious "one liner" (that already had been written on three lines kept together within parentheses).
HTH.

So I'm assuming you are trying to process a Fasta like file and so the way I would do it is to first get the header and separate the pieces with Regex. Following that you can store the A:42.52 B... in a list for easy access. The code is as follows.
import re
def processHeader(line):
positions = re.search(r':(.*)', line).group(1)
positions = positions.split('; ')
return positions
dnaSeq = ''
positions = []
with open('myFasta', 'r') as infile:
for line in infile:
if '>' in line:
positions = processHeader(line)
else:
dnaSeq += line.strip()

I am not sure I completely understand the goal (and I think this post is more suitable for a comment, but I do not have enough privileges) but I think that the key to you solution is using .split(). You can then join the elements of the resulting list just by using + similar to this:
>>> result = line.split(' ')
>>> result
['1EK9:A.41,52;', 'B.61,74;', 'C.247,257;', 'D.279,289', 'ENLMQVYQQARLSNPELRKSAADRDAAFEKINEARSPLLPQLGLGAD', 'YTYSNGYRDANGINSNATSASLQLTQSIFDMSKWRALTLQEKAAGIQ', 'DVTYQTDQQTLILNTATAYFNVLNAIDVLSYTQAQKEAIYRQLDQTT', 'QRFNVGLVAITDVQNARAQYDTVLANEVTARNNLDNAVEQLRQITGN',
'YYPELAALNVENFKTDKPQPVNALLKEAEKRNLSLLQARLSQDLARE', 'QIRQAQDGHLPTLDLTASTGISDTSYSGSKTRGAAGTQYDDSNMGQN', 'KVGLSFSLPIYQGGMVNSQVKQAQYNFVGASEQLESAHRSVVQTVRS', 'SFNNINASISSINAYKQAVVSAQSSLDAMEAGYSVGTRTIVDVLDAT', 'TTLYNAKQELANARYNYLINQLNIKSALGTLNEQDLLALNNALSKPV', 'STNPENVAPQTPEQNAIADGYAPDSPAPVVQQTSARTTTSNGHNPFRN']
>>> result[3]+result[4]
'D.279,289ENLMQVYQQARLSNPELRKSAADRDAAFEKINEARSPLLPQLGLGAD'
>>>
etc. You can also use the usual following syntax to extract the elements of the list that you need:
>>> result[5:]
['YTYSNGYRDANGINSNATSASLQLTQSIFDMSKWRALTLQEKAAGIQ', 'DVTYQTDQQTLILNTATAYFNVLNAIDVLSYTQAQKEAIYRQLDQTT', 'QRFNVGLVAITDVQNARAQYDTVLANEVTARNNLDNAVEQLRQITGN', 'YYPELAALNVENFKTDKPQPVNALLKEAEKRNLSLLQARLSQDLARE', 'QIRQAQDGHLPTLDLTASTGISDTSYSGSKTRGAAGTQYDDSNMGQN', 'KVGLSFSLPIYQGGMVNSQVKQAQYNFVGASEQLESAHRSVVQTVRS', 'SFNNINASISSINAYKQAVVSAQSSLDAMEAGYSVGTRTIVDVLDAT', 'TTLYNAKQELANARYNYLINQLNIKSALGTLNEQDLLALNNALSKPV', 'STNPENVAPQTPEQNAIADGYAPDSPAPVVQQTSARTTTSNGHNPFRN']
and join them together:
>>> reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, result[5:])
'YTYSNGYRDANGINSNATSASLQLTQSIFDMSKWRALTLQEKAAGIQDVTYQTDQQTLILNTATAYFNVLNAIDVLSYTQAQKEAIYRQLDQTTQRFNVGLVAITDVQNARAQYDTVLANEVTARNNLDNAVEQLRQITGNYYPELAALNVENFKTDKPQPVNALLKEAEKRNLSLLQARLSQDLAREQIRQAQDGHLPTLDLTASTGISDTSYSGSKTRGAAGTQYDDSNMGQNKVGLSFSLPIYQGGMVNSQVKQAQYNFVGASEQLESAHRSVVQTVRSSFNNINASISSINAYKQAVVSAQSSLDAMEAGYSVGTRTIVDVLDATTTLYNAKQELANARYNYLINQLNIKSALGTLNEQDLLALNNALSKPVSTNPENVAPQTPEQNAIADGYAPDSPAPVVQQTSARTTTSNGHNPFRN'
remember that + on lists produces a list.
By the way I would not remove '\n' to start with as you may try to use it to extract the first line similar to the above with using space to extract "words".
UPDATE (starting from result):
#getting A indexes
letter_seq=result[5:]
ind=result[:4]
Aind=ind[0].split('.')[1].replace(';', '')
#getting one long letter seq
long_letter_seq=reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, letter_seq)
#extracting the final seq fromlong_letter_seq using Aind
output = long_letter_seq[int(Aind.split(',')[0]):int(Aind.split(',')[1])]
the last line is just a union of several operations that were also used earlier.
Same for B C D etc -- so a lot of manual work and calculations...
BE CAREFUL with indexes of A -- numbering in python starts from 0 which may not be the case in your numbering system.
The more elegant solution would be using re (https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html) to find pettern using a mask, but this requires very well defined rules for how to look up the sequence needed.
UPDATE2: it is also not clear to me what is the role of spaces -- so far I removed them but they may matter when counting the letters in the original string.

In Python,if startswith values in tuple, I also need to return which value

I have an area codes file I put in a tuple
for line1 in area_codes_file.readlines():
if area_code_extract.search(line1):
area_codes.append(area_code_extract.search(line1).group())
area_codes = tuple(area_codes)
and a file I read into Python full of phone numbers.
If a phone number starts with one of the area codes in the tuple, I need to do to things:
1 is to keep the number
2 is to know which area code did it match, as need to put area codes in brackets.
So far, I was only able to do 1:
for line in txt.readlines():
is_number = phonenumbers.parse(line,"GB")
if phonenumbers.is_valid_number(is_number):
if line.startswith(area_codes):
print (line)
How do I do the second part?

The simple (if not necessarily highest performance) approach is to check each prefix individually, and keep the first match:
for line in txt:
is_number = phonenumbers.parse(line,"GB")
if phonenumbers.is_valid_number(is_number):
if line.startswith(area_codes):
print(line, next(filter(line.startswith, area_codes)))
Since we know filter(line.startswith, area_codes) will get exactly one hit, we just pull the hit using next.
Note: On Python 2, you should start the file with from future_builtins import filter to get the generator based filter (which will also save work by stopping the search when you get a hit). Python 3's filter already behaves like this.
For potentially higher performance, the way to both test all prefixes at once and figure out which value hit is to use regular expressions:
import re
# Function that will match any of the given prefixes returning a match obj on hit
area_code_matcher = re.compile(r'|'.join(map(re.escape, area_codes))).match
for line in txt:
is_number = phonenumbers.parse(line,"GB")
if phonenumbers.is_valid_number(is_number):
# Returns None on miss, match object on hit
m = area_code_matcher(line)
if m is not None:
# Whatever matched is in the 0th grouping
print(line, m.group())
Lastly, one final approach you can use if the area codes are of fixed length. Rather than using startswith, you can slice directly; you know the hit because you sliced it off yourself:
# If there are a lot of area codes, using a set/frozenset will allow much faster lookup
area_codes_set = frozenset(area_codes)
for line in txt:
is_number = phonenumbers.parse(line,"GB")
if phonenumbers.is_valid_number(is_number):
# Assuming lines that match always start with ###
if line[:3] in area_codes_set:
print(line, line[:3])

Workaround for index out of range while searching through FASTA file

I'm working on a program that lets the user enter a sequence they want to find inside a FASTA file, after which the program shows the description line and the sequence that belongs to it.
The FASTA can be found at hugheslab.ccbr.utoronto.ca/supplementary-data/IRC/IRC_representative_cdna.fa.gz, it's approx. 87 MB.
The idea is to first create a list with the location of description lines, which always start with a >. Once you know what are the description lines, you can search for the search_term in the lines between two description lines. This is exactly what is done in the fourth paragraph, this results in a list of 48425 long, here is an idea of what the results are: http://imgur.com/Lxy8hnI
Now the fifth paragraph is meant to search between two description lines, let's take lines 0 and 15 as example, this would be description_list[a] and description_list[a+1] as a = 0 and a+1 = 1, and description_list[0] = 0 and description_list[1] = 15. Between these lines the if-statement searches for the search term, if it finds one it will save description_list[a] into the start_position_list and description_list[a+1] into the stop_position_list, which will be used later on.
So as you can imagine a simple term like 'ATCG' will occur often, which means the start_position_list and stop_position_list will have a lot of duplicates, which will be removed using list(set(start_position_list)) and afterwards sorting them. That way start_position_list[0] and start_position_list[0] will be 0 and 15, like this: http://imgur.com/QcOsuhM, which can then be used as a range for which lines to print out to show the sequence.
Now, of course, the big issue is that line 15, for i in range(description_list[a], description_list[a+1]): will eventually hit the [a+1] while it's already at the maximum length of description_list and therefore will give a list index out of range error, as you see here as well: http://imgur.com/hi7d4tr
What would be the best solution for this ? It's still necessary to go through all the description lines and I can't come up with a better structure to go through them all ?
file = open("IRC_representative_cdna.fa")
file_list = list(file)
search_term = input("Enter your search term: ")
description_list = []
start_position_list = []
stop_position_list = []
for x in range (0, len(file_list)):
if ">" in file_list[x]:
description_list.append(x)
for a in range(0, len(description_list)):
for i in range(description_list[a], description_list[a+1]):
if search_term in file_list[i]:
start_position_list.append(description_list[a])
stop_position_list.append(description_list[a+1])

The way to avoid the subscript out of range error is to shorten the loop. Replace the line
for a in range(0, len(description_list)):
by
for a in range(0, len(description_list)-1):
Also, I think that you can use a list comprehension to build up description_list:
description_list = [x for x in file_list if x.startswith('>')]
in addition to being shorter it is more efficient since it doesn't do a linear search over the entire line when only the starting character is relevant.

Here is a solution that uses the biopython package, thus saving you the headache of parsing interleaved fasta yourself:
from Bio import SeqIO
file = open("IRC_representative_cdna.fa")
search_term = input("Enter your search term: ")
for record in SeqIO.parse(file, "fasta"):
rec_seq = record.seq
if search_term in rec-seq:
print(record.id)
print(rec-seq)
it wasn't very clear to me what your desired output is, but this code can be changed easily to fit it.