Question

I have written a crude Python program to pull phrases from an index in a CSV file and write these rows to another file.

import csv

total = 0

ifile = open('data.csv', "rb")
reader = csv.reader(ifile)

ofile = open('newdata_write.csv', "wb")
writer = csv.writer(ofile, delimiter='\t', quotechar='"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)

for row in reader:
    if ("some text") in row[x]:
        total = total + 1
        writer.writerow(row)
    elif ("some more text") in row[x]:
        total = total + 1   
        writer.writerow(row) 
    elif ("even more text I'm looking for") in row[x]:  
        total = total + 1   
        writer.writerow(row)

   < many, many more lines >

print "\nTotal = %d." % total

ifile.close()

My question is this: Isn’t there a better (more elegant/less verbose) Pythonic way to do this? I feel this is a case of not knowing what I don’t know. The CSV file I’m searching is not large (3863 lines, 669 KB) so I don’t think it is necessary to use SQL to solve this, although I am certainly open to that.

I am a Python newbie, in love with the language and teaching myself through the normal channels (books, tutorials, Project Euler, Stack Overflow).

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It’s not a huge improvement, but you could do something like

keyphraseList = (
     "some text",
     "some more text",
     "even more text I'm looking for")

...
for row in reader:
   for phrase in keyphraseList:
       if phrase in row[x]:
           total = total + 1
           writer.writerow(row)
           break

(not tested)