CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonlinux
Zézouille
Zézouille

Reputation: 533

Split the results from os.popen

I'm using python3.6 for automatically finding some files in my computer:

import os
criteria = 'something'
file_names = os.popen('find dir -name "*%s*"' % criteria).read()
for file_name in file_names:
   #do something
   pass

The problem is that by doing .read(), all the file names including some criteria is concatenated into one string. How can I get a list of file names as output in order to iterating in the 'for' loop? Thanks a lot

Upvotes: 2

Views: 787

Answers (2)

Swadhikar
Swadhikar

Reputation: 2210

Just add split() after read() function as below:

file_names = os.popen('find dir -name "*%s*"' % criteria).read().split()

The thing is read function returns raw string from output say as below:

>>> os.popen('find . -name "*%s*"' % criteria).read()
'./pymp-0kz_4tay\n./pymp-4zfymo3o\n./pymp-k79d3tvz\n./pymp-wq9g900h\n./pymp-v0jvlbzm\n./pymp-lc69tv22\n./pymp-3sqjot2q\n./pymp-fsfv6c3t\n./pymp-

where criteria is pymp in my case. So from the output its clear that I have to split the output by \n which is done by split('\n') method.

Sample Output

>>> file_names = os.popen('find . -name "*%s*"' % criteria).read().split('\n')
>>>
>>>
>>> for file in file_names: print(file)
...
./pymp-0kz_4tay
./pymp-4zfymo3o
./pymp-k79d3tvz
./pymp-wq9g900h

Upvotes: 2

Energya
Energya

Reputation: 2673

In the generic case, you are looking to split a string. The easiest way is to use the built-in .split() method of Python's strings. Example:

>>> ' 1  2   3  '.split()
['1', '2', '3']

For more details, see the documentation

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions