CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
JollyAcres
JollyAcres

Reputation: 11

re.search in Python yields "none" when using a file as the input

I am very new to stack overflow and to programming in general, and appreciate any help you can provide!

I want to use the re.search function in Python to find text in a file (this is just practice, because ultimately I want to use re.sub and regular expressions to find/replace). But I can't get it to work!

For example, if I enter the following code into Python:

import re
SearchStr = 'world'
Result = re.search(SearchStr,"Hello world")
print Result

I get the following output: <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x106875e00> Great!

But then I made a file called "python_test.txt" which contains the text "Hello world", and I ran the following script:

import re
InFileName = 'python_test.txt'
InFile = open(InFileName, 'r')
SearchStr = 'world'
Result = re.search(SearchStr,InFile)
print Result

I get the following output: None

If I replace the last three lines with InFile.read(), I get 'Hello world.\n' as the output, so I think my script is reading the file just fine. I have also tried using InFile.read() instead of InFile in my re.search terms; that didn't work either. Why doesn't my script find "world" in my file?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 42

Answers (1)

Dmitry Ermolov
Dmitry Ermolov

Reputation: 2237

re.search expects string as the second argument. Not the file. Try use:

Result = re.search(SearchStr,InFile.read())

Upvotes: 2

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