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Tutorial: Look for strings that start with a specific sub-string using regular expression in Python

In this example, we used regular expression to implement the strings.startswith() function. The program will ask for users' input on a sub-string to find at the beginning of each string. The program will then open a file and print out the lines that start with the sub-string being specified. #Implementing Python's string.startswith() using regular expression # import the regular expression module import re # allow users to specify what string to look for as the start of a string start_str = raw_input("Enter the string that starts a line: ") # specify the name of the file to search within file_name = 'my_file.txt' # open the file for reading file_h = open(file_name, 'r') # define the pattern # ^ : start of the string # {} : place holder for start_str # ^{} -> ^start_str # -> pattern: a string that starts with the content stored in start_str # if You want to specify a word, followed by a space, that starts a string # leave a space after

A way to sort a Python dictionary by value, instead of key

Here I used the code on page 122 ~ 123 of the book ' Python for Informatics ’ by Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) as an example to explain how to sort the key value pairs in a Python dictionary by value. # open the file named remeo.txt fhand = open('romeo.txt') # create a dictionary counts = dict() # read the file line by line for line in fhand: # split the line by whitespace characters (space, tab, newline, return, formfeed) words = line.split() # read the individual word for word in words: # increase the word count by 1 for that specific 'word' counts[word] = counts.get(word, 0 ) + 1 # create our list lst = list() # iterate over each tuple (key value pair) in the list generated by counts.items() for key, val in counts.items(): # create a new tuple (value, key) and append to our list, so that sort() will sort the list by the first element, value. # if we want to sort the list (or you can say dictionary) by key, we

Tutorial: Using String.find() and String slicing with [n:m] notation to extract data in Python

When you need to extract data from a string in Python, you can use the built-in String.find() method in Python and the String[n:m] notation to extract the sub-string. string.find(str) will return the starting position of the first instance of str in string. For example. 'abcdecd'.find('cd') will return 2, because the first 'cd' instance starts at position 2 (not 3, since position starts with 0). If no str can be found in the string, the method will return -1. str[n:m] notation will extract the sub-string starting at position n and ending at position m-1, not including the m-th character. For example, if the content of my_str is 'I don't know', my_str[2:] will return 'don't know'. By using string.find() and [n:m] notation, we can write a script to automatically extract the data we need from a string. For example, we have a file test_score.txt that records the scores of all the students enrolled in a class. We know that each line re