Question

I’m pretty sure I’m over thinking this and there’s a simple outcome for it, but I just can’t seem to put it all together.

I’m looking for a kind of a search method. I’d like a Python script search a text file for a keyword and count how many lines it appears on. Though if the keyword comes up on a single line multiple times, I’d like to still only count it once.

Long story short; If a keyboard comes up on a single line, I want it to count that line and add it to what will be a math equation.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can define the following function.

def lcount(keyword, fname):
    with open(fname, 'r') as fin:
        return sum([1 for line in fin if keyword in line])

Now if you want to know the number of lines containing “int” in “foo.cpp”, you do:

print lcount('int', 'foo.cpp')

An alternative that you can do on the command line (if you are on an appropriate platform) is:

grep int foo.cpp | wc -l