Hello friends. Newb question here. I'm trying to find an efficient way to "grep" a file with python. The problem is that all the solutions I find on the web read a line at a time from the file with a "for line in" loop and check each line for the RE instead of sweeping through the entire file. This looks terribly inefficient...
I can read the entire file like so: open("/etc/passwd").read() and use that in an re.search - e.g: re.search("root",open("/etc/passwd").read()) The above will work BUT it will not interpolate the "\n" as a newline and will just print the entire file as a long line. So if I try to look for '^root' (line starting with root) instead of 'root' it will NOT work any ideas on how to get around this? Thanks. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list