Develop Reference

I am wondering why my search phonebook function is not working correctly

I currently have a working phonebook with 4 options. The only thing is, the search option is not printing all of the matches.
If I type a name and there is a match in the phonebook it will print that line into a text file (phone.txt02, which is blank).
Then after all of the matches have been printed to the text file, my program reads the new text file and returns them in my preferred format.
The readFile function isn't working properly right now for the new text file.
It works fine on phone.txt (the original text file) which contains the same information... Names and numbers separated by a comma.
Because this works, I cannot figure out why the readFile function will not work for phone02.txt when the values are also name,number \n
def readFile1(filename):
phonebook = []
file = open(filename, "r")
for aline in file:
person = aline.split(",")
if person[1][-1] == '\n' :
pn = person.pop(1)
person.append(pn[:-1])
phonebook.append(person)
elif person[1][-1] != '\n' :
phonebook.append(person)
file.close()
return phonebook
def printEntries1(phonebook):
readFile1("phone02.txt")
print("Name Phone Number")
print("------------------- --------------")
for i in range (len(phonebook)):
person = phonebook[i]
print(i,"{:<20s} {:>14s}".format(person[0],person[1]))
print("------------------- --------------")
def searchEntry():
search = input("Type a name to search for")
with open("phone.txt", "r") as file:
lines = file.readlines()
for line in lines:
if search in line:
outfile = open("phone02.txt", "a")
outfile.write(line)
phonebook = readFile1("phone02.txt")
print(readFile1("phone02.txt"))
printEntries1(phonebook)
outfile = open("phone02.txt", "r+")
outfile.truncate()
print(searchEntry())
I am not sure how to have the printEntries print all of the matches (name and number) from phone02.txt
Here is an example of the phone.txt file
Polly,549-5393
Bud Wieser,(213) 477-3928
Jack,277-4829
Mike Dunleavy,335-3453
Robert Darn,219-473-4373
Earl Lee,703-304-8393
Tim Bean,(612) 493-2629
Bud,(701) 487-8522
If I were to input "Bud" it would print the 2 lines that contain bud to phone02.txt but not print them correctly.
It seems that (in this example) when the 2 lines containing Bud are put into phone02.txt, only the first line is printing
Name. Number
------------------- ------------------
0 Bud Wieser. (218) 477-3928
I know this is a lot of information for most likely an easy fix, but I think it should help with the issue.
Thanks for any help.

You never closed the writer to phone02.txt. All new lines will be saved in the file only after you close the file writer or directly tell python to do save the changes to the file. Please try
if search in line:
outfile = open("phone02.txt", "a")
outfile.write(line)
outfile.close()
Anyway, you open the file for reading many times -- please either do it once before the loop and close afterwards, or open and close the writer for each iteration.

Multiple Search Terms and Output Files

I have a file I'm searching through and printing the results to a file. I'm wondering if it's possible to amend the code below to read in multiple search terms i.e. print any line that has "test" or "hello" (user will specify) in it but have Python create a new output file for each search term?
i.e. Ofile1 would hold all lines containing "test"
Ofile2 would hold all lines containing "hello" and so on
f = open('file3.txt') #input file
term = raw_input("What would you like to search for?") #takes an input to be searched
for line in f:
if term in line:
print (line) #print line of matched term
f.close() #close file
Is this possible to do?

Based of #new user code (improved some error) you could do something like this:
terms = raw_input("What would you like to search for?")
terms = terms.split(" ")
for term in terms:
f = open('text.txt')
filename = '{}_output.txt'.format(term)
o = open(filename, 'w')
for line in f:
if term in line:
o.write(line)
o.close()
f.close()
Maybe you can think that is better open the file once and check some term per each line. Depending of number of terms it will be more or less efficient, if you want could research about it using really big files to check execution times and learn a bit more.

Split your term by spaces. then use a for loop to loop through all of the terms.
ex:
terms = term.split(" ")
for t in terms:
filename = t +"_output.txt"
o = open(filename,'w')
for line in f:
if t in line:
o.write(line) #print line of matched term
o.close()

How to print a specific line from a file

I am trying to print a specific line from the file "Scores", which is option B. This is my code:
print("Option A: Show all scores\nOption B: Show a record\nOption Q: Quit")
decision = input("Enter A, B, C or Q: ")
myFile = open("Scores.txt", "rt")
if decision == "A":
record = myFile.read()
print(record)
myFile.close()
elif decision == "B" or decision == "b":
playerName = input("Enter a player name to view their scores: ")
record = myFile.read()
answer = record.find(playerName)
for line in answer:
print(line)
elif decision == "Q" or decision == "q":
exit
I went for Option B, then I entered a player name that holds the score of the player, but it throws this error message:
line 12, in <module>
for line in answer():
TypeError: 'int' object is not callable

A few cents from my side :
file = open("file")
lines = file.readlines()
for line in lines:
if playername in line:
print line
file.close()
Hope it works!

find() method returns a positive index if it succeeds, -1 otherwise
You should loop on your content line by line, as follows:
for line in myFile:
if line.find(playerName):
print(line)

A safer way to read the file and find data, so that you will not have OutOfMemory issues when storing the whole file in memory.
playerName = input("Enter a player name to view their scores: ")
with open("Scores.txt", 'r') as f:
for row in f:
if playerName in row:
print row
This way you will be using with that will close the file by itself either when the program ends or Garbage Collection kicks in. This way python will read the file line by line and store only 1 line in memory. So you can use huge files and do not worry about memory issues.
Hope it helps :)

Working with str methods will take more acrobatics. Try the following,
import re
p = re.compile(r"\b{}\b".format(playername)) # keep it ready
# inside option B
for line in myfile: # no need to `.read()` it
match = p.search(line)
if match:
print(line)
break # if there is only one record for playername
See if it works for you.

similar thing here:
Reading specific lines only (Python)
fp = open("file")
for i, line in enumerate(fp):
if line == playername:
print line
fp.close()
I also notice you don't close your file for each decision, should make that happen.

Few python idioms and small optimization
Here are many answer, my sample brings in few python idioms and optimize it a bit:
fname = "Scores.txt"
player_name = "Quido"
with open(fname) as f:
for line in f:
if player_name in line:
print line
break
print "Going on doing following tasks."
The with block will close the open file on exiting the inner block. No need to f.close(), safe
in case of problems to read the file.
for line in f: shows, that iterating over file open in text mode we get one line per iteration.
break after we print the line with the player will effectively stop iterating over lines assuming,
there is only one such line or that we are happy with the very first one. If this is not the case,
removing the break allows printing all lines containing the player name.
As lines returned from text file iterator contain new line, you may prefer to get rid of them. Use
print line.strip() in such case what will remove all blank characters from start and end of the line.
Final print is proving, the program continues after it processes all the lines.
It may happen, that you get no output for name, which appears to be present in the file. In such a
case, you might need to clarify letter case. For example, if your text file contains all the names
in exact casing, you have to enter the name properly.
Other option is to lower-case the player_name and compare it against lower cased line:
fname = "Scores.txt"
player_name = "Quido"
normalized_player_name = player_name.lower()
with open(fname) as f:
for line in f:
if normalized_player_name in line.lower():
print line.strip()
break # comment out to print all lines with the player
print "Going on doing following tasks."
Note, that we normalize the player_name outside from the loop to be a bit faster. Lower-casing inside the
loop would work, but would do the same task repeatedly.
The line is printed using exact letter cases as in the file.

Printing to a file via Python

Hopefully this is an easy fix. I'm trying to edit one field of a file we use for import, however when I run the following code it leaves the file blank and 0kb. Could anyone advise what I'm doing wrong?
import re #import regex so we can use the commands
name = raw_input("Enter filename:") #prompt for file name, press enter to just open test.nhi
if len(name) < 1 : name = "test.nhi"
count = 0
fhand = open(name, 'w+')
for line in fhand:
words = line.split(',') #obtain individual words by using split
words[34] = re.sub(r'\D', "", words[34]) #remove non-numeric chars from string using regex
if len(words[34]) < 1 : continue # If the 34th field is blank go to the next line
elif len(words[34]) == 2 : "{0:0>3}".format([words[34]]) #Add leading zeroes depending on the length of the field
elif len(words[34]) == 3 : "{0:0>2}".format([words[34]])
elif len(words[34]) == 4 : "{0:0>1}".format([words[34]])
fhand.write(words) #write the line
fhand.close() # Close the file after the loop ends

I have taken below text in 'a.txt' as input and modified your code. Please check if it's work for you.
#Intial Content of a.txt
This,program,is,Java,program
This,program,is,12Python,programs
Modified code as follow:
import re
#Reading from file and updating values
fhand = open('a.txt', 'r')
tmp_list=[]
for line in fhand:
#Split line using ','
words = line.split(',')
#Remove non-numeric chars from 34th string using regex
words[3] = re.sub(r'\D', "", words[3])
#Update the 3rd string
# If the 3rd field is blank go to the next line
if len(words[3]) < 1 :
#Removed continue it from here we need to reconstruct the original line and write it to file
print "Field empty.Continue..."
elif len(words[3]) >= 1 and len(words[3]) < 5 :
#format won't add leading zeros. zfill(5) will add required number of leading zeros depending on the length of word[3].
words[3]=words[3].zfill(5)
#After updating 3rd value in words list, again creating a line out of it.
tmp_str = ",".join(words)
tmp_list.append(tmp_str)
fhand.close()
#Writing to same file
whand = open("a.txt",'w')
for val in tmp_list:
whand.write(val)
whand.close()
File content after running code
This,program,is,,program
This,program,is,00012,programs

The file mode 'w+' Truncates your file to 0 bytes, so you'll only be able to read lines that you've written.
Look at Confused by python file mode "w+" for more information.
An idea would be to read the whole file first, close it, and re-open it to write files in it.

Not sure which OS you're on but I think reading and writing to the same file has undefined behaviour.
I guess internally the file object holds the position (try fhand.tell() to see where it is). You could probably adjust it back and forth as you went using fhand.seek(last_read_position) but really that's asking for trouble.
Also, I'm not sure how the script would ever end as it would end up reading the stuff it had just written (in a sort of infinite loop).
Best bet is to read the entire file first:
with open(name, 'r') as f:
lines = f.read().splitlines()
with open(name, 'w') as f:
for l in lines:
# ....
f.write(something)

For 'Printing to a file via Python' you can use:
ifile = open("test.txt","r")
print("Some text...", file = ifile)

Python compare bombs if files not sorted

I have written some code to compare two files via a search string.
The file = master data file
The checkfile = list of states & regions
When I have more than 1 state in the file that is not in sorted order it bombs out.
How can i get this to work without having to sort my "file"
The Error message: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./gangnamstyle.py", line 27, in
csvLineList_2 = csv2[lineCount].split(",")
IndexError: list index out of range
My code:
#!/usr/bin/python
import csv
file = raw_input("Please enter the file name to search: ") #File name
checkfile = raw_input("Please enter the file with the search data: ") #datafile
save_file = raw_input("Please enter the file name to save: ") #Save Name
search_string = raw_input("Please type string to search for: ") #search string
#row = raw_input("Please enter column text is in: ") #column number - starts at 0
#ID_INDEX = row
#ID_INDEX = int(ID_INDEX)
f = open(file)
f1 = open(save_file, 'a')
csv1 = open(file, "r").readlines()
csv2 = open(checkfile, "r").readlines()
#what looks for the string in the file
copyline=False
for line in f.readlines():
if search_string in line:
copyline=True
if copyline:
f1.write(line)
for lineCount in range( len( csv1) ):
csvLineList_1 = csv1[lineCount].split(",")
csvLineList_2 = csv2[lineCount].split(",")
if search_string == csvLineList_2[0]:
f1.write(csvLineList_2[2])
f1.close() #close saved file
f.close() #close source file
#csv1.close()
#csv2.close()

OK, so that error message is an IndexError: list index out of range in the line csvLineList_2 = csv2[lineCount].split(","). There's only one indexing happening there, so apparently lineCount is too big for csv2.
lineCount is one of the values of range(len(csv1)). That makes it automatically in range for csv1. Apparently csv1 and csv2 are not the same length, causing the IndexError.
Now that's quite possible, because they contain lines from different files. Apparently the files don't have equal number of lines.
To be honest I have no clue why you are reading the lines into csv1 at all. You loop over those lines and split them (into the variable csvLineList_1), but you never use that variable.
I think your loop should just be:
for line in csv2:
parts = line.strip().split(",") # line.strip() removes whitespace and the newline
# at the end of the line
if search_string == parts[0]:
f1.write(parts[2] + "\n") # Add a newline, you probably want it
I hope this helps.

The error you're getting is probably due to the file lengths not being equal.
It's not exactly clear from what you've written, what you're hoping to do. It looks to me like (maybe) you want to find a search term in "master file", and if you find it, write the line you find to the "save file". It also looks to me like you want to find that same search term in the very first field of the "check file", and if you find it, write the contents of the third field into the "save file". If that's wrong, it's because your code has bugs.
Either way, there's a bunch of issues in the code you've posted, and you're probably going to get at least some mileage out of using the csv module to do what you're trying to do.
Maybe post a fuller problem description.
Edit:
import csv
import sys
def build_state_lookup(fn):
with open(fn) as infile:
reader = csv.reader(infile)
# throw away first line
reader.next()
# now build a dictionary mapping state to region
lookup = {state: region for (state, _, region) in reader}
return lookup
def process_big_file(in_fn, checkfile, out_fn):
lookup = build_state_lookup()
with open(in_fn) as infile:
with open(out_fn, 'w') as outfile:
reader = csv.reader(infile)
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
# output the header row
writer.writerow(reader.next() + ['Region'])
for row in reader:
state = row[0]
region = lookup.get(state, "No Region Found")
row.append(region)
writer.writerow(row)
def main():
process_big_file(*sys.argv[1:])
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()