Develop Reference

How to print the content of the last saved text file in a folder using Python

I want to print the content of the last saved text file in a folder using Python. I wrote the below code. It is printing out only the path of the file but not the content.
folder_path = r'C:\Users\Siciid\Desktop\restaurant\bill'
file_type = r'\*txt'
files = glob.glob(folder_path + file_type)
max_file = max(files, key=os.path.getctime)
filename=tempfile.mktemp('.txt')
open(filename,'w').write(max_file)
os.startfile(filename,"print")
Is it possible to do this in Python. Any suggestion. I would appreciate your help. Thank you.

You can do that using the following code. Just replace the line where you open and write a file with these two lines:
with open(max_file, "r") as f, open(filename, 'w') as f2:
f2.write(f.read())
The max_file variable contains a file name, not the contents of the file, so writing it to the temp file and printing that will simply print the file name instead of its contents. To put its contents into the temporary file, you need to open the file and then read it. That is what the above two lines of code do.

How to edit XML file using Python?

I have a list of XML documents with the following structure. I need to delete this line:
<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">
using Python code, as manually deleting it would be very time consuming as there lots of files.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">
<pdf2xml producer="poppler" version="0.62.0">
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1262" width="892">
</page>
</pdf2xml>

You can read files line by line and then write them back without the line you don't want in the file. Just be sure what you want to delete - is it exactly the line you wrote? Is it always the second line? Is every !DOCTYPE line? Is it first !DOCTYPE line? Etc.
import os
import sys
# Assumes first argument when running the script is a directory containing XML files
directory = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "."
files = os.listdir(directory)
for f in files:
# Ignore not XML files
if not f.endswith(".xml"):
continue
# Read file content
with open(f, 'r') as f_in:
content = f_in.readlines()
# Rewrite the original file
with open(f, 'w') as f_out:
for line in content:
# The condition may differ based on what you really want to delete
if line != "<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM \"pdf2xml.dtd\">\n":
f_out.write(line)
Things to consider:
If the files are big you may not want to load them into the memory
It is inefficient for example in case you want to always delete just the second line in the file.
Do you really need/want to use Python for that? There are better solutions. For example, if you are on Linux or Mac you can use sed:
for f in *.xml; do sed -i '' -n '/<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">/!p' $f; done

First, open the file:
f = open("yourfile.txt","r")
Next, get all your lines from the file:
lines = f.readlines()
Now you can close the file:
f.close()
And reopen it in write mode:
f = open("yourfile.txt","w")
Then, write your lines back, except the line you want to delete. You might want to change the "\n" to whatever line ending your file uses.
for line in lines:
if not line.startswith('<!DOCTYPE'):
f.write(line)
At the end, close the file again.
f.close()

find and replace characters in Python3

I want to replace word after finding a specific word in a file using python. I tried re.replace or re.sub function but does not get help.
File Contents :
hostname: "abc-myvm-lx01"
I want to keep "hostname: " as static and replace rest of values.
After replacement file will be look like :
hostname: "abc-urvm-lx02"

How about parsing the file yourself:
# READ ENTRIES FROM FILE
entries = {}
with open('your_file.txt', 'r') as file:
for line in file:
entry = line.split(':')
# Allow values like abc:myvm:lx01
entries[entry[0]] = ':'.join(entry[1:]).strip()
# Modify entries['hostname'] in any way you want
# WRITE ENTRIES TO FILE
with open('your_file.txt', 'w') as file:
file.writelines('{}: {}\n'.format(*entry) for entry in entries.items())

Python- need to append characters to the beginning and end of each line in text file

I should preface that I am a complete Python Newbie.
Im trying to create a script that will loop through a directory and its subdirectories looking for text files. When it encounters a text file it will parse the file and convert it to NITF XML and upload to an FTP directory.
At this point I am still working on reading the text file into variables so that they can be inserted into the XML document in the right places. An example to the text file is as follows.
Headline
Subhead
By A person
Paragraph text.
And here is the code I have so far:
with open("path/to/textFile.txt") as f:
#content = f.readlines()
head,sub,auth = [f.readline().strip() for i in range(3)]
data=f.read()
pth = os.getcwd()
print head,sub,auth,data,pth
My question is: how do I iterate through the body of the text file(data) and wrap each line in HTML P tags? For example;
<P>line of text in file </P> <P>Next line in text file</p>.

Something like
output_format = '<p>{}</p>\n'.format
with open('input') as fin, open('output', 'w') as fout:
fout.writelines( output_format(line.strip()) for line in fin )

This assumes that you want to write the new content back to the original file:
with open('path/to/textFile.txt') as f:
content = f.readlines()
with open('path/to/textFile.txt', 'w') as f:
for line in content:
f.write('<p>' + line.strip() + '</p>\n')

with open('infile') as fin, open('outfile',w) as fout:
for line in fin:
fout.write('<P>{0}</P>\n'.format(line[:-1]) #slice off the newline. Same as `line.rstrip('\n')`.
#Only do this once you're sure the script works :)
shutil.move('outfile','infile') #Need to replace the input file with the output file

in you case, you should probably replace
data=f.read()
with:
data = '\n'.join("<p>%s</p>" % l.strip() for l in f)

use data=f.readlines() here,
and then iterate over data and try something like this:
for line in data:
line="<p>"+line.strip()+"</p>"
#write line+'\n' to a file or do something else

append the and <\p> for each line
ex:
data_new=[]
data=f.readlines()
for lines in data:
data_new.append("<p>%s</p>\n" % data.strip().strip("\n"))

You could use the fileinput module to modify one or more files in-place, with optional backup file creation if desired (see its documentation for details). Here's it being used to process one file.
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input('testinput.txt', inplace=1):
print '<P>'+line[:-1]+'<\P>'
The 'testinput.txt' argument could also be a sequence of two or more file names instead of just a single one, which could be useful especially if you're using os.walk() to generate the list of files in the directory and its subdirectories to process (as you probably should be doing).

Python blank txt file creation

I am trying to create bulk text files based on list. A text file has number of lines/titles and aim is to create text files. Following is how my titles.txt looks like along with non-working code and expected output.
titles = open("C:\\Dropbox\\Python\\titles.txt",'r')
for lines in titles.readlines():
d_path = 'C:\\titles'
output = open((d_path.lines.strip())+'.txt','a')
output.close()
titles.close()
titles.txt
Title-A
Title-B
Title-C
new blank files to be created under directory c:\\titles\\
Title-A.txt
Title-B.txt
Title-C.txt

It's a little difficult to tell what you're attempting here, but hopefully this will be helpful:
import os.path
with open('titles.txt') as f:
for line in f:
newfile = os.path.join('C:\\titles',line.strip()) + '.txt'
ff = open( newfile, 'a')
ff.close()
If you want to replace existing files with blank files, you can open your files with mode 'w' instead of 'a'.

The following should work.
import os
titles='C:/Dropbox/Python/titles.txt'
d_path='c:/titles'
with open(titles,'r') as f:
for l in f:
with open(os.path.join(d_path,l.strip()),'w') as _:
pass