Question

I have this code that should open and read two text files, and match when a word is present in both. The match is represented by printing “SUCESS” and by writing the word to a temp.txt file.

dir = open('listac.txt','r')
path = open('paths.txt','r')
paths = path.readlines()
paths_size = len(paths)
matches = open('temp.txt','w')
dirs = dir.readlines()

for pline in range(0,len(paths)):
        for dline in range(0,len(dirs)):
                p = paths[pline].rstrip('\n').split(".")[0].replace(" ", "")
                dd = dirs[dline].rstrip('\n').replace(" ", "")
                #print p.lower()
                #print dd.lower()
                if (p.lower() == dd.lower()):
                        print "SUCCESS\n"
                        matches.write(str(p).lower() + '\n')

listac.txt is formatted as

/teetetet
/eteasdsa
/asdasdfsa
/asdsafads
.
. 
...etc

paths.txt is formated as

/asdadasd.php/asdadas/asdad/asd
/adadad.html/asdadals/asdsa/asd
.
.
...etc

hence I use the split function in order to get the first /asadasda (within paths.txt) before the dot.
The problem is that the words never seem to match, I have even printed out each comparison before each IF statement and they are equal, is there something else that Python does before comparing strings?

=======

Thanks everyone for the help. As suggested by you, I cleaned the code so It ended up like this:

dir = open('listac.txt','r')
path = open('paths.txt','r')
#paths = path.readlines()
#paths_size = len(paths)

for line in path:
        p = line.rstrip().split(".")[0].replace(" ", "")
        for lines in dir:
                d = str(lines.rstrip())
                if p == d:
                        print p + " = " + d

Apparently, having p declared and initialized before entering the second for loop makes a difference in the comparison down the road. When I declared p and d within the second for loop, it wouldn’t work. I don’t know the reason for that but If someone does, I am listening 🙂

Thanks again!

Answer 1

I’d have to see more of your data set to see why you aren’t getting matches. I’ve refactored some of your code to be more pythonic.

dirFile = open('listac.txt','r')
pathFile = open('paths.txt','r')
paths = pathFile.readlines()
dirs = dirFile.readlines()

matches = open('temp.txt','w')

for pline in paths:
    p = pline.rstrip('\n').split(".")[0].replace(" ", "")
    for dline in dirs:
        dd = dline.rstrip('\n').replace(" ", "")
        #print p.lower()
        #print dd.lower()
        if p.lower() == dd.lower():
            print "SUCCESS\n"
            matches.write(str(p).lower() + '\n')