[Tutor] Problems with partial string matching

[Joel Goldstick]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 2:16 PM, Josep M. Fontana <josep.m.fontana at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> As I said in another message with the heading "Using contents of a
> document to change file names", I'm trying to learn Python "by doing"
> and I was working on a little project where I had to change the names
> of the files in a directory according to some codes contained in a CSV
> file. With the help of the participants in this list I managed to
> overcome some of the first obstacles I found and managed to create a
> dictionary out of the structured contents of the CSV file.
>
> Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to continue working on my
> project and I didn't get back to the script until now. I have
> encountered another hurdle, though, which doesn't allow me to go on.
> The problem might be *very* simple to solve but I've spent the last
> couple of hours checking manuals and doing searches on the internet
> without having much success.
>
> What I'm trying to do now is to use the dictionary I created (with
> entries such as {'I-02': '1399', 'I-01': '1374',...}) to iterate over
> the file names I want to change and do the necessary string
> substitutions. If one of the keys in the dictionary matches the code
> that is found at the beginning of every file, then the value of the
> dictionary representing the year in which the text was written is
> appended at the end of the file name.
>
> Here is what I've done so far:
> ------------------------------
> import os, sys, glob, re
> fileNameYear =
> open(r'/Volumes/DATA/Documents/workspace/GCA/CORPUS_TEXT_LATIN_1/FileNameYear.txt',
> "U").readlines()
> name_year = {}
> for line in fileNameYear: #File objects have built-in iteration
>    name, year = line.strip().split(',')
>    name_year[name] = year #effectively creates the dictionary by
> creating keys with the element 'name' returned by the loop and
> assigning them values corresponding to the element 'year' --> !d[key]
> = value" means Set d[key] to value.
> os.getcwd()
> os.chdir('/Volumes/DATA/Documents/workspace/GCA/CORPUS_TEXT_LATIN_1')
> file_names = glob.glob('*.txt')
> for name_of_file in file_names:
>    if name_of_file.startswith(name):
>        re.sub('__', '__' + year, name_of_file) #The files have names
> such as 'B-13-Viatges_Marco_Polo__.txt' so the first argument in
> re.sub() is the string '__' which should be replaced by the same
> string followed by the string corresponding to the year value in the
> dictionary (also a string)
> ------------------------------
>
> I run this and I don't get any errors. The names of the files in the
> directory, however, are not changed. What am I doing wrong?
>
> As always, your help is greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Josep M.
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You are not renaming the file, just the string named name_of_file.

Check out os.rename

-- 
Joel Goldstick
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