Question

I am working on a script and the script should read a text file and test to see if the specified letters(a,a,r,d,v,a,r,k) are on each line. Im having a problem as I am trying to check for 3 different a’s instead of just one. My code is below:

#Variables
advk = ['a','a','r','d','v','a','r','k']
textfile = []
number = 0
life = 0

for line in open('input.txt', 'rU'):
    textfile.append(line.rstrip().lower())


while life == 0:
    if all(word in textfile[number] for word in advk):
        printed = number + 1
        print ("Aardvark on line " + str(printed))
        number+=1
        if number == len(textfile):
            life+=1

    else:
        number+=1

Answer 1

Everytime you want to count something in python, keep the Counter class in mind.

---

from collections import Counter

advk = Counter(['a','a','r','d','v','a','r','k'])

with open('input.txt', 'rU') as file:
    for i, line in enumerate(file.readlines()):
        if not advk - Counter(line.lower()):
            print ("Aardvark on line " + str(i+1))

---

Given the input line

dffdaardvarksdsda

the Counter would look like these

Counter({'d': 5, 'a': 4, 'f': 2, 's': 2, 'r': 2, 'k': 1, 'v': 1})

and

Counter({'a': 3, 'r': 2, 'd': 1, 'k': 1, 'v': 1})

for your list of letters to search.

We use a trick by simply substracting the two Counters advl - Counter(line.lower()) and check if the resulting Counter has no elements left.

---

Other things to note:

You can use the with statement to ensure your file gets closed.
You can use enumerate instead counting the line numbers.