parsing text from a file

[MRAB]

Wes James wrote:
> If I read a windows registry file with a line like this:
> 
> "{C15039B5-C47C-47BD-A698-A462F4148F52}"="v2.0|Action=Allow|Active=TRUE|Dir=In|Protocol=6|Profile=Public|App=C:\\Program
> Files\\LANDesk\\LDClient\\tmcsvc.exe|Name=LANDesk Targeted
> Multicast|Edge=FALSE|"
> 
> with this code:
> 
> f=open('fwrules.reg2.txt')
> 
> for s in f:
>   if s.find('LANDesk') <0:
>     print s,
> 
> 
> LANDesk is not found.
> 
> Also this does not work:
> 
> for s in f:
>   try:
>     i=s.index('L')
>     print s[i:i+7]
>  except:
>    pass
> 
> all it prints is "LAND"
> 
> how do I find LANDesk in a string like this.  is the "\\" messing things up?
> 
How do you know what's in the file? Did you use an editor? It might be 
that the file contents are encoded in, say, UTF-16 and the editor is 
detecting that and decoding it for you, but Python's open() function is 
just returning the contents as a bytestring (Python 2.x).

Try:

import codecs
f = codecs.open('fwrules.reg2.txt', encoding='UTF-16')

for s in f:
     if u'LANDesk' in s:
         print s,

f.close()