On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Scott Stueben <[email protected]> wrote:
> I would like to search a text file for a list of strings, like a sql query.
What do you want to do if you find one? Do you want to get every line
that contains any of the strings, or a list of which strings are
found, or just find out if any of the strings are there?
> For instance: To search a text file for the values 'Bob', 'John',
> 'Joe', 'Jim', and 'Fred', you would have to open the dialog and do
> five separate searches. Lots of copying and pasting, lots of room for
> typos.
You can do this with a regular expression. For example,
import re
findAny = re.compile('Bob|John|Joe|Jim|Fred')
for found in findAny.findall(s):
print found
will print all occurrences of any of the target names.
You can build the regex string dynamically from user input; if
'toFind' is a list of target words, use
findAny = re.compile('|'.join(re.escape(target) for target in toFind))
re.escape() cleans up targets that have special characters in them.
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