CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
jeffkrop
jeffkrop

Reputation: 147

How to "highlight" a word found in a text file?

I am searching a text file for a word. It finds the word and returns the line that has the word. This is good, but I would like to highlight or make the word bold in that line.

Can I do this in Python? Also I could use a better way to get the users txt file path. 

def read_file(file):
    #reads in the file and print the lines that have searched word. 
    file_name = raw_input("Enter the .txt file path: ")
    with open(file_name) as f:
        the_word = raw_input("Enter the word you are searching for: ")
        print ""
        for line in f:
            if the_word in line:
                print line

Upvotes: 6

Views: 36088

Answers (3)

zondo
zondo

Reputation: 20336

Note: This will work only in the console. You cannot color text in a plaintext file. That is why it is called plaintext.

One format for special characters is \033[(NUMBER)(NUMBER);(NUMBER)(NUMBER);...m

The first number can be 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. For colors, we use only 3 and 4. 3 means foreground color, and 4 means background color. The second number is the color:

0 black
1 red
2 green
3 yellow
4 blue
5 magenta
6 cyan
7 white
9 default

Therefore, to print "Hello World!" with a blue background and a yellow foreground, we could do the following:

print("\033[44;33mHello World!\033[m")

Whenever you start a color, you will want to reset to the defaults. That is what \033[m does.

Upvotes: 16

user3672754
user3672754

Reputation:

I think that what you mean by highlight is printing the text with a different color. You can not save text with a different color (unless you be using html or something like that)

With the answer provided by @zondo you should get some code like this (python3)

import os

file_path = input("Enter the file path: ")

while not os.path.exists(file_path):
    file_path = input("The path does not exists, enter again the file path: ")


with open(file_path, mode='rt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    text = f.read()


search_word = input("Enter the word you want to search:")

if search_word in text:
    print()
    print(text.replace(search_word, '\033[44;33m{}\033[m'.format(search_word)))
else:
    print("The word is not in the text")

An example of using html, would be:

if search_word in text:
    with open(file_path+'.html', mode='wt', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        f.write(text.replace(search_word, '<span style="color: red">{}</span>'.format(search_word)))
else:
    print("The word is not in the text")

Then a file ending with .html will be created and you can open it with your navigator. Your word will be highlighted in red! (That's a really basic code)

happy hacking

Upvotes: 3

elegent
elegent

Reputation: 4007

You could use Pythons string.replace method for this problem:

#Read in the a file
with file = open('file.txt', 'r') :
    filedata = file.read()

#Replace 'the_word' with * 'the_word' * -> "highlight" it
filedata.replace(the_word,  "*" + the_word + '*')

#Write the file back
with file = open('file.txt', 'w') :
    file.write(filedata)`

Upvotes: 1

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