SamAnw

split the strings at the s an m marks (and h for hour) and place it into a a new string with colons inbetween.
do you not have required reading material for this sort of homework that can be consulted? Because otherwise, Googling stuff effectively is also a trait a programmer should build up.

This is the main issue. Your print statement only executes once. However you want the print statement to run for each line in the file, so a loop is a good choice.
 
At the start of your program "a = file.read()" reads the entire file into the variable "a". One option is to use a for loop over the lines in the file:
 
txt = "Prob06.in.txt" file = open(txt,"r") for line in file: state = line.split() pos = "W" neg = "B" ... LED1= int((n - LED2)/4) print(LED[LED1], LED[LED2]) Notice that from the line "state = line.split()" to print are all indented, putting them inside that for loop.
 
 
Here is my complete rewrite of your program for your perusal (and because I want to look/feel clever). It is obviously different from your program, so don't turn it in as your own homework:
STATES = {"BADGER": 0, "MUSHROOM": 1} LED = ("off", "red", "green", "blue") with open("in") as f: for ln, line in enumerate(f): try: bits = [STATES[i] for i in line.split()] led1, led2 = 2*bits[0] + bits[1], 2*bits[2] + bits[3] print(LED[led1], LED[led2]) except: print(f"Bad line: {ln}")  

I'll give you a few tips, instead of any full solution:
#This is really clunky if state[i].startswith(neg): #Replace with simply if state[i] == "BROKEN": Or you could replace the whole while-loop with something like e.g.:
for itemState in state: if itemState == "BROKEN": n += 8/(2**i) else: print("invalid entry 1") i+=1 As for the print-clause, you need to either put your print-statement in the above loop or make a separate loop for it, if you want more than one line of output.

You're only printing once, so obviously you won't be getting more than one line of output...