Comparing all Contents of a list to all lines within a text File

ParsonsCoffee 0
Viewed 38

Below I have a list identifiers where values are appended within for loop logic not shown, this part is fine as it's quite basic.

The next part is where I am quite confused as to what I am doing wrong, so I open a local text file and readLines here, I use a for loop to iterate through those lines. If any of the lines in the textfile match any of the lines in the identifiers list then I do not want to send an email (email function is fine). If the ID isn't in the textFile I want to write this id from identifiers list to the text file, the way it is working at the minute it does not seem to do anything.

identifiers = []
....
identifiers.append(rowList[0])
....
fo = open('localDirectory/textFile.txt', 'r+')
content = fo.read().splitlines()
for id in content:
    if any(i in id for i in identifiers):
        print("No email to send")
    else:
        fo.write(identifiers[i]+'\n') **Write new ID to indentifiers text file**
        #Send Email
readlines if-statement python
3 Answers

You dont need touse for loop in if comparison, since you have been searching if a string from identifiers contained in line from file. Here is right comparison

for id in content:
    if id not in identifiers:
        print("No email to send")
    else:
        fo.write(identifiers[i]+'\n') **Write new ID to indentifiers text file**
        #Send Email
hosboglot0

You don't need to loop over your content, as you already do that in the list comprehension. Also, consider using with open(), so you automatically close your file.

identifiers = ['patternA']

with open('textfile.txt') as f:
    content = f.read().splitlines()

if any(i in identifiers for i in content):
    print("Present")
else:
    print("Not Present")
Tom Ribbens0

Since you have multiple lines in identifiers that you might want to add, a straight if/else doesn't work. So you need to add a flag to see if you added lines or not, which you test for later to see if you need to send an email.

with open('textfile.txt', "r+") as f:
    content = f.read().splitlines()

    id_added = False
    for i in identifiers:
        if i not in content:
            f.write(i + '\n')
            id_added = True

        if id_added:
            # Send email
        else:
            print("no email to send")
Tom Ribbens0
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