Question

The elif stament should print the log files and path that were not found in a search that I conduct. However, they yield every line that is searched in a single file (a plethora of info). What am I doing wrong?

 for line in fileinput.input(walk_dir(directory, (".log", ".txt"))):
      result = regex.search(whitespace.sub('', line))
      if result:
          template = "\nLine: {0}\nFile: {1}\nString Type: {2}\n\n"
          output = template.format(fileinput.filelineno(), fileinput.filename(), result.group())

          print output
          temp.write(output)
          break
      elif not result:
          template = "\nLine: {0}\nString not found in File: {1}\nString Type: {2}\n\n"
          output = template.format(fileinput.filelineno(), fileinput.filename(), result.group())

          print output
          temp.write(output)

  else:          
      print "There are no files in the directory!!!"

Actual Code:

 elif searchType =='2':
      print "\nDirectory to be searched: " + directory
      print "\nFile result2.log will be created in: c:\Temp_log_files."
      paths = "c:\\Temp_log_files\\result2.log"
      temp = file(paths, "w")
      userstring = raw_input("Enter a string name to search: ")
      userStrHEX = userstring.encode('hex')
      userStrASCII = ''.join(str(ord(char)) for char in userstring)
      regex = re.compile(r"(%s|%s|%s)" % ( re.escape( userstring ), re.escape( userStrHEX ), re.escape( userStrASCII )))
      goby = raw_input("Press Enter to begin search (search ignores whitespace)!\n")


      def walk_dir(directory, extensions=""):
          for path, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
             for name in files:
                if name.endswith(extensions):
                   yield os.path.join(path, name)

      whitespace = re.compile(r'\s+')
      for line in fileinput.input(walk_dir(directory, (".log", ".txt"))):
          result = regex.search(whitespace.sub('', line))
          if result:
              template = "\nLine: {0}\nFile: {1}\nString Type: {2}\n\n"
              output = template.format(fileinput.filelineno(), fileinput.filename(), result.group())

              print output
              temp.write(output)
              #break
          elif result not in line:

              output = fileinput.filename()

              print output
              temp.write(output)
              break 

      else:          
          print "There are no files in the directory!!!"

Answer 1

You’re iterating over every line of every file passed to fileinput.input(...), right? And you perform the if statement for every line. If the condition is true, then you break, but if the condition is false, you don’t break, but write to temp. So for every line in fileinput.input that doesn’t match the condition, you write a line to temp and print output. (Actually, the above is wrong — see edit below.)

Also, elif str(result) not in line: will have strange results — just use else as others have suggested. If result evaluates to false in this situation, then result == None, which means that str(result) == 'None', which means that if a line contains None, then you’ll have unexpected results.

Edit: Ok, actually, looking more closely at your actual code the above is wrong, strictly speaking. But the point remains — fileinput.input() returns a FileInput object that in essence concatenates the files and iterates over every line in turn. Since in some cases you don’t want to perform an action per line, but per file, you’ll have to iterate over them individually. You could do this without fileinput but since that’s what you’re using, we’ll stick with that:

for filename in walk_dir(directory, (".log", ".txt")):
    for line in fileinput.input(filename):
        result = regex.search(whitespace.sub('', line))
        if result:
            template = "\nLine: {0}\nFile: {1}\nString Type: {2}\n\n"
            output = template.format(fileinput.filelineno(), fileinput.filename(), result.group())
            print output
            break   # (assuming you only want to print the first result)
    else:
        ouput = fileinput.filename()
        print output
        temp.write(output)
        break

The way this works: for every file in the list, this prints the first match in the file, or prints the filename if no match was found. You can use else with a for loop in python; the else block at the end of the loop is executed if the loop is not broken. Since no match was found, the filename is printed.

If you wanted to print out all matches in a file, you could save the matches in a list, and instead of using else, you could test the list. Simplified example:

matches = []
for line in fileinput.input(filename):
    if searchline(line):
        matches.append(line)
if matches:
    print template.format(matches)
else:
    print fileinput.filename()