How to search for a string in text files?

Question

I want to check if a string is in a text file. If it is, do X. If it\'s not, do Y. However, this code always returns True for some reason. Can anyone see what i

Answer 1

Two problems:

1. Your function does not return anything; a function that does not explicitly return anything returns None (which is falsy)

2. True is always True - you are not checking the result of your function

.

def check(fname, txt):
    with open(fname) as dataf:
        return any(txt in line for line in dataf)

if check('example.txt', 'blabla'):
    print "true"
else:
    print "false"

Answer 2

Here's another. Takes an absolute file path and a given string and passes it to word_find(), uses readlines() method on the given file within the enumerate() method which gives an iterable count as it traverses line by line, in the end giving you the line with the matching string, plus the given line number. Cheers.

  def word_find(file, word):
    with open(file, 'r') as target_file:
        for num, line in enumerate(target_file.readlines(), 1):
            if str(word) in line:
                print(f'<Line {num}> {line}')
            else:
                print(f'> {word} not found.')


  if __name__ == '__main__':
      file_to_process = '/path/to/file'
      string_to_find = input()
      word_find(file_to_process, string_to_find)

Answer 3

Here's another way to possibly answer your question using the find function which gives you a literal numerical value of where something truly is

open('file', 'r').read().find('')

in find write the word you want to find and 'file' stands for your file name

Answer 4

The reason why you always got True has already been given, so I'll just offer another suggestion:

If your file is not too large, you can read it into a string, and just use that (easier and often faster than reading and checking line per line):

with open('example.txt') as f:
    if 'blabla' in f.read():
        print("true")

Another trick: you can alleviate the possible memory problems by using mmap.mmap() to create a "string-like" object that uses the underlying file (instead of reading the whole file in memory):

import mmap

with open('example.txt') as f:
    s = mmap.mmap(f.fileno(), 0, access=mmap.ACCESS_READ)
    if s.find('blabla') != -1:
        print('true')

NOTE: in python 3, mmaps behave like bytearray objects rather than strings, so the subsequence you look for with find() has to be a bytes object rather than a string as well, eg. s.find(b'blabla'):

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import mmap

with open('example.txt', 'rb', 0) as file, \
     mmap.mmap(file.fileno(), 0, access=mmap.ACCESS_READ) as s:
    if s.find(b'blabla') != -1:
        print('true')

You could also use regular expressions on mmap e.g., case-insensitive search: if re.search(br'(?i)blabla', s):

Answer 5

found = False

def check():
    datafile = file('example.txt')
    for line in datafile:
        if blabla in line:
            found = True
            break
    return found

if check():
    print "true"
else:
    print "false"

Answer 6

How to search the text in the file and Returns an file path in which the word is found (Как искать часть текста в файле и возвращять путь к файлу в котором это слово найдено)

import os
import re

class Searcher:
    def __init__(self, path, query):
        self.path   = path

        if self.path[-1] != '/':
            self.path += '/'

        self.path = self.path.replace('/', '\\')
        self.query  = query
        self.searched = {}

    def find(self):
        for root, dirs, files in os.walk( self.path ):
            for file in files:
                if re.match(r'.*?\.txt$', file) is not None:
                    if root[-1] != '\\':
                        root += '\\'           
                    f = open(root + file, 'rt')
                    txt = f.read()
                    f.close()

                    count = len( re.findall( self.query, txt ) )
                    if count > 0:
                        self.searched[root + file] = count

    def getResults(self):
        return self.searched

In Main()

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

import sys
from search import Searcher

path = 'c:\\temp\\'
search = 'search string'


if __name__ == '__main__':

    if len(sys.argv) == 3:
        # создаем объект поисковика и передаем ему аргументы
        Search = Searcher(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])
    else:
        Search = Searcher(path, search)

    # начать поиск
    Search.find()

    # получаем результат
    results = Search.getResults()

    # выводим результат
    print 'Found ', len(results), ' files:'

    for file, count in results.items():
        print 'File: ', file, ' Found entries:' , count