How do you write a loop to merge 2 elements every N number of elements in a list?

I first took this data in a text file below:

text in data.txt:
text: 8473
second: second text
3rd: 23-54-65-87

txt: 583
sec: sec text
3) 5343-436654-98989

And I changed it into a list like this:

['text:', '8473', 'second:', 'second', 'text', '3rd:', '23-54-65-87', 'txt:', '583', 'sec:', 'sec', 'text', '3)', '5343-436654-98989']

I then removed everything with a colon. And my next step in the program below is to manually merge ‘second’ and ‘text’ and then ‘sec’ and ‘text’. This wont work in a program with an undetermined number of data in the above format. So I want to do this as a loop that can produce the following result(note that now ‘second text’ and ‘sec text’ are one item:

['8473', 'second text', '23-54-65-87', '583', 'sec text', '5343-436654-98989']

But I can only find ways to merge every pair of items, but I can’t find a way to merge an item with the next item every 3 items like I want to….

Here is the program so far:

file = 'data.txt'
corrected = []
one = []
two = []
three = []
full = [one, two, three]
with open(file, 'r') as f:
    contents = f.read()
    list = contents.split()
    print(list)

    for item in list:
        if ":" not in item:
            if ")" not in item:
            

corrected.append(item)

**corrected[1] = corrected[1] + ' ' + corrected[2]
del corrected[2]
corrected[4] = corrected[4] + ' ' + corrected[5]
del corrected[5]
print(f"{corrected}nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn")**

for item in corrected[::3]:
    one.append(item)
for item in corrected[1::3]:
    two.append(item)
for item in corrected[2::3]:
    three.append(item)
index = 1
for item in full:
    print(f"{index}:{item}")
    index += 1

Current and desired Resulting output:

    1:['8473', '583']
    2:['second text', 'sec text']
    3:['23-54-65-87', '5343-436654-98989']

Answer

Sounds to me like you just want to discard the first word of every row:

text='''text: 8473
second: second text
3rd: 23-54-65-87

txt: 583
sec: sec text
3) 5343-436654-98989'''

result = [row.split(maxsplit=1)[1] for row in text.split('n') if row]

print(result)
# ['8473', 'second text', '23-54-65-87', '583', 'sec text', '5343-436654-98989']

If the text is read from a file, then the split on 'n' is implicit:

with open('data.txt', 'r') as f:
    result = [row.split(maxsplit=1)[1] for row in f if row]

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Answer