Question

I am attempting to make this function (that searches a dir for a given string) search all sub dirs as well, and do this recursively. I don’t know Python well enough to begin. Any guidance would be great.

Thanks!

def grep(regex, base_dir):
    matches = list()
    for filename in os.listdir(base_dir):
        full_filename = os.path.join(base_dir, filename)
        if not os.path.isfile(full_filename):
            continue
        with open(os.path.join(base_dir, filename)) as fh:
            content = fh.read()
            matches = matches + re.findall(regex, content)
    return matches

Answer 1

If you’re looking to crawl an entire directory, try os.walk(). Something like this may work (untested, but can adjust if it doesn’t work):

def grep(regex, base_dir):
    matches = list()
    # os.walk() returns a tuple - the directory path, a list of directories and the files
    for dirpath, dirname, files in os.walk(base_dir):
        # Iterate through the directory list, reading the files
        for directory in dirname:
          for filename in os.listdir(directory):
              with open(os.path.join(base_dir, directory, filename)) as fh:
                  content = fh.read()
                  matches = matches + re.findall(regex, content)
    return matches