Question

this is my first day with python and i’m stuck. I have a file which content looks like this:

• Declaration //skip
• foo bar //shown as option
• Labels //skip
• 1 foo
• 2 foo
• 3 bar
• 4 foo bar
• …
• 23546477 bar bar bar bar foo

If the user choose foo, I just want to return 1,2, 4 and 23546477 and write in a file:

• Target 1
• Target 2
• Target 4
• Target 23546477

This is what I have come up so far:

import sys
import re

def merge():

   if (len(sys.argv) > 1):
    labfile = sys.argv[1]
    f = open(labfile, 'r')
    f.readline()
    string = f.readline()
    print "Possible Target States:"
    print string
    var = raw_input("Choose Target States: ")
    print "you entered ", var
    f.readline()
    words = var.split()
    for line in f.readlines():
      for word in words:
        if word in line:
          m = re.match("\d+", line)
          print m
          //get the first number and store it in a list or an array or something else

    f.close()

merge() 

unfortunately it is not working – I see lines like <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fce496c0100> instead of the output I want.

Answer 1

You want to do (at least):

if m:  #only execute this if a match was found
   print m.group()  #m.group() is the portion of the string that matches your regex.