Python - Print all log lines that match a pattern between 2 time stamps

Question

Working to print lines that match a specific pattern between a start time and an end time.

Example log line:

Fri Mar 01 HH:MM:SS YYYY:thresholdcrossed

I am looking for an equivalent of the following:

cat /path/file.log | egrep -v "exec|param" | grep thresholdcrossed | sed -n /$start/,/$stop/ >output.file

The start and stop will be user generated variables based on the start and stop times they are searching.

This will give me matches for a single line using regular expressions, but I can't get all lines that match between 2 time stamps.

for line in hand:
    line = line.rstrip()
    if re.search("Mar 10 21.+:.+tstat-threshcrosso", line)  :
        print line

Answer 1

# user defined time range in milliseconds since epoch and
start_ms = 
end_ms = 
# user defined pattern
pattern = "tstat-threshcrosso"

# loop through whole file
for line in hand:
    # strip the line
    line = line.rstrip()

    # parse the line to get time_stamp_ms (ms since epoch) and log_message
    time_stamp_ms = 
    log_message =

    # break if we went beyond end time
    if time_stamp_ms > end:
        break

    # check if the time stamp is within user defined period
    if time_stamp_ms < start_ms:
        continue

    # check for string pattern match
    if pattern in log_message:
        print line

You can optimize this by doing a binary search to find the first line after the start time.