Using a text file with strings and searching for the strings in files in folders

Question

I'm working on searching for strings inside text files. What I have is a CSV file with multiple lines of a single word. Now I need to search files in multiple folders and subfolders for the words in this CSV file. In the end I would like to dump out the results into a text file. The results should have the original word and the result file name that the string was found in. How do you loop through a CSV file with strings while searching files for with these strings? I've only come across individual Python programs that will search for one string in a folder and then print out the results. I've modified one of these to print to a file but am having trouble looping through a CSV search string file.

Answer 1

I suggest the following approach: read the CSV file and create the list of search words. Then create a regular expression out of them, matching any of these words:

regexp = re.compile( '(' + '|'.join(words) + ')' )

Then go through the files using os.walk and apply the regexp to them using re.search .