searching files

[William Park]

zweistein <zweistein at net.hr> wrote:
> "Chris Liechti" <cliechti at gmx.net> wrote in message
> news:Xns920BB71141B16cliechtigmxnet at 62.2.16.82...
>> please provide more information about your data structure and what exactly
>> you want to search (names, numbers etc) and you will get more useful
>> feedback from this group.
> 
> Well, I am storing every entry in a file. It stores only the name and the
> telephone number, and is tab delimited (name surname [TAB] tel.). I am
> trying to write a function to which a searchstring would be passed which
> would look into the entire file and show the entry that matches.
> I would like it to search both names and tel. numbers.

This is no-brainer in Unix, ie.
    egrep 'surname' file
    awk '/surname/ {print}' file
In pure Python, you have to read the file into list, and do string/re search.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
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