Find a famous writer in a random string

I'm doing a CodeEval challenge, where the object is to find a famous writers name and a year, inside of a random given string.

You have a set of rows with names of famous writers encoded inside. Each row is divided into 2 parts by pipe char (|). The first part has a writer's name. The second part is a "key" to generate a name.

Your goal is to go through each number in the key (numbers are separated by space) left-to-right. Each number represents a position in the 1st part of a row. This way you collect a writer's name which you have to output.

Challenge input:

osSE5Gu0Vi8WRq93UvkYZCjaOKeNJfTyH6tzDQbxFm4M1ndXIPh27wBA rLclpg| 3 35 27 62 51 27 46 57 26 10 46 63 57 45 15 43 53

3Kucdq9bfCEgZGF2nwx8UpzQJyHiOm0hoaYP6ST1WM7Nks5XjrR4IltBeDLV vA| 2 26 33 55 34 50 33 61 44 28 46 32 28 30 3 50 34 61 40 7 1 31

Expected output:

Stephen King 1947

Kyotaro Nishimura 1930

I've successfully solved this problem and would like some critique on my work:

import sys

def find_a_writer(string, int_list):
    """ Find a famous writer and a year in a random string
    >>> print(find_a_writer("osSE5Gu0Vi8WRq93UvkYZCjaOKeNJfTyH6tzDQbxFm4M1ndXIPh27wBA rLclpg",
    >>> ['3', '35', '27', '62', '51', '27', '46', '57', '26', '10', '46', '63', '57', '45', '15', '43', '53']))
    Stephen King 1947"""
    results = []
    string_list = list(string)
    for i in int_list:
        results.append(string_list[int(i) - 1])
    return ''.join(results)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    with open(sys.argv[1]) as data:
        for line in data.readlines():
            data_arr = line.rstrip().strip().split("|")
            print(find_a_writer(data_arr[0].strip(), data_arr[1].strip().split(" ")))

What I would like to know:

• What did I do well?

• Is there anything I can do better?

• Can I shorten the function?

3) Yes, you can shorten the function:

def decide(mess, indexes):
    return ''.join(mess[int(i)-1] for i in indexes)

I just removed the unnecessary conversion to list and replaced the append loop with a generator expression.

Tuple unpacking allows more documenting names:

mess, indexes = lunedì.split('|')
print(decoder(mess, indexes.split()))

I do not think you need so much stripping at the file parsing step.

StackExchange Code Review Q#147909, answer score: 6