Question

I m trying to open up a text file and look for string Num_row_lables. If the value for Num_row_labels is greater than or equal to 10, then print the name of the file.

In the example below, my text file test.mrk has some text in the format below: P.s., my text file doesn’t have Num_row_labels >= 10. It always has “equal to“.

Format= { Window_Type="Tabular", Tabular= { Num_row_labels=10 } }

so I created a variable teststring to hold the pattern I will be looking at.
Then I opened the file.

Then using re, I got Num_row_labels=10 in my variable called match.
Using group() on match, I extracted the threshold number I wanted and using int() converted the string to int.

My purpose is to read the text file to find/print the value for Num_row_labels along with the name of file if the text file has Num_row_labels = 10 or any # greater than 10.

Here’s my test code:

import os
import os.path
import re

teststring = """Format= { Window_Type="Tabular", Tabular= { Num_row_labels=10 } }"""
fname = "E:\MyUsers\ssbc\test.mrk"
fo = open(fname, "r")
match = re.search('Num_row_labels=(\d+)', teststring)
tnum = int(match.group(1))


if(tnum>=10):
        print(fname) 

How do I make sure that I m searching the match in the content of opened file and checking the condition for tnum>=10? My test code would simply print the file name only on the basis of last 4 lines. I want to be sure that the search is all over the content of my text file.

Answer 1

so what you want to do is to read out the whole file as a string, and search for your pattern on that string

with open(fname, "r") as fo:
    content_as_string = fo.read()
    match = re.search('Num_row_labels=(\d+)', content_as_string)
    # do want you want to the matchings