def process_dialect_translation_rules():

    # Read in lines from the text file specified in sys.argv[1], stripping away
    # excess whitespace and discarding comments (lines that start with '##').
    f_lines = [line.strip() for line in open(sys.argv[1], 'r').readlines()]
    f_lines = filter(lambda line: not re.match(r'##', line), f_lines)

    # Remove any occurances of the pattern '\s*<=>\s*'. This leaves us with a 
    # list of lists. Each 2nd level list has two elements: the value to be 
    # translated from and the value to be translated to. Use the sub function
    # from the re module to get rid of those pesky asterisks.
    f_lines = [re.split(r'\s*<=>\s*', line) for line in f_lines]
    f_lines = [re.sub(r'"', '', elem) for elem in line for line in f_lines]

This function should take the lines from a file and perform some operations on the lines, such as removing any lines that begin with ##. Another operation that I wish to perform is to remove the quotation marks around the words in the line. However, when the final line of this script runs, f_lines becomes an empty lines. What happened?

Requested lines of original file:

##  English-Geek Reversible Translation File #1
##   (Moderate Geek)
##  Created by Todd WAreham, October 2009

"TV show"    <=> "STAR TREK"
"food"       <=> "pizza"
"drink"      <=> "Red Bull"
"computer"   <=> "TRS 80"
"girlfriend" <=> "significant other"