Prerequisite: Regular Expression in Python
Many of the times we need to search for a particular type of file from a list of different types of files. And we can do so with only a few lines of code using python. And the cool part is we don’t need to install any external package, python has a built-in package called re, with which we can easily write the program for performing this task.
Approach:
- This program searches for the files having “.xml” extension from a list of different files.
- Make a regular expression/pattern : “\.xml$”
- Here re.search() function is used to check for a match anywhere in the string (name of the file). It basically returns the match object when the pattern is found and if the pattern is not found it returns null.
- The functionality of different Metacharacters used here:
- \ It is used to specify a special meaning of character after it. It is also used to escape special characters.
- $ The string ends with the pattern which is before it.
Below is the implementation:
Python3
# import library import re # list of different types of file filenames = [ "gfg.html" , "Lazyroar.xml" , "computer.txt" , "neveropen.jpg" ] for file in filenames: # search given pattern in the line match = re.search( "\.xml$" , file ) # if match is found if match: print ( "The file ending with .xml is:" , file ) |
Output:
The file ending with .xml is: Lazyroar.xml