Question

I have the following in my python script..

hostIP = sys.argv[1]
hostsFileLoc = "hosts.txt"

if not hostIP in open(hostsFileLoc).read():
    # Script to add if the string is not in file
else:
    # Print message

The only problem with this is that it is not an exact match, for example…

If my file contains:

192.168.0.111

And my hostIP is:

192.168.0.11

Then it will find it as a match. I thought I might be able to do this with regex, as there will always be a space ("\s+") or a comma ("\,") so I thought I could use something like

test = re.compile("^" + hostIP + "[\s\,]*")

and use test as my search, but this obviously does not work. I’ve tried to find some documentation on this but to no avail. Has anyone a suggestion on how I can use a variable with regex to have a more specific search.

Thanks

MHibbin

Answer 1

you can split your text file by delimiters (whitespace for example) and then find string in the list:

if not hostIP in open(hostsFileLoc).read().split():
    # Script to add if the string is not in file
else:
    # Print message

Put your delimiter into split() if you use other than whitespaces