Question

I have the following code which looks through the files in one directory and copies files that contain a certain string into another directory, but I am trying to use Regular Expressions as the string could be upper and lowercase or a mix of both.

Here is the code that works, before I tried to use RegEx’s

import os
import re
import shutil

def test():
    os.chdir("C:/Users/David/Desktop/Test/MyFiles")
    files = os.listdir(".")
    os.mkdir("C:/Users/David/Desktop/Test/MyFiles2")
    for x in (files):
        inputFile = open((x), "r")
        content = inputFile.read()
        inputFile.close()
        if ("Hello World" in content)
            shutil.copy(x, "C:/Users/David/Desktop/Test/MyFiles2")

Here is my code when I have tried to use RegEx’s

import os
import re
import shutil

def test2():
    os.chdir("C:/Users/David/Desktop/Test/MyFiles")
    files = os.listdir(".")
    os.mkdir("C:/Users/David/Desktop/Test/MyFiles2")
    regex_txt = "facebook.com"
    for x in (files):
        inputFile = open((x), "r")
        content = inputFile.read()
        inputFile.close()
        regex = re.compile(regex_txt, re.IGNORECASE)

Im guessing that I need a line of code that is something like

if regex = re.compile(regex_txt, re.IGNORECASE) == True

But I cant seem to get anything to work, if someone could point me in the right direction it would be appreciated.

Answer 1

import re
if re.match(regex, content):
  blah..

You could also use re.search depending on how you want it to match.

You can run this example:

"""
very nice interface to try regexes: https://regex101.com/
"""
# %%
"""Simple if statement with a regex"""
import re

regex = r"\s*Proof.\s*"
contents = ['Proof.\n', '\nProof.\n']
for content in contents:
    assert re.match(regex, content), f'Failed on {content=} with {regex=}'
    if re.match(regex, content):
        print(content)