How to extract specific data from a text file in Python?

Question

This is a text file accountinfo.txt:

Luke TonyHawk123! [email protected]  
Cindy JasonVoorhees123! [email protected]

I want to ask the user for their email to print the values (i.e. their username and password) on the left. For example, if the user inputs [email protected], it should return Luke and TonyHawk123.
I've tried using strip and split, but my logic is wrong.

Work I've done so far:

account_file = open("accountinfo.txt")
email_string = account_file.read().strip().split()
while True:
    email_account = input("Enter the email linked to your account: \n")
    if email_account == "":
        continue
    if email_account in email_string:
        # ???
    else:
        print("This email doesn't exist in our records.")
        main()

Checking email_account in email_string doesn't work, because ("Luke", "TonyHawk123!", "[email protected]") is what's in email_string. You would need to extract the email address and probably put it into a dictionary for retrieval. — unddoch
– unddoch, Commented Jan 25, 2020 at 20:55

Olvin Roght · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-25 21:39:21Z

1

You can apply csv.reader here:

import csv

with open("accountinfo.txt") as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f, delimiter=" ")
    email = input("Enter the email linked to your account: \n")
    for row in reader:
        if row and row[2] == email:
            print(" ".join(row[:2]))
            break
    else:
        print("This email doesn't exist in our records.")
        main()

You can also split each line manually:

with open("accountinfo.txt") as f:
    email = input("Enter the email linked to your account: \n")
    for line in f:
        if email and email in line:
            print(line.rsplit(" ", 1)[0])
            break
    else:
        print("This email doesn't exist in our records.")
        main()

edited Jan 25, 2020 at 21:39

answered Jan 25, 2020 at 21:03

Olvin Roght

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Comments

PABLO I. OCHOA · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-25 21:10:40Z

0

I don´t know how the information of each e-mail is arranged but if they´re in the same file. I did a similar program, but the information of each username was separated with a sting like this: "----------------". So I iterated through lines until it found the e-mail. Once it found it, I would print every line until it found another "----------------". So all the user´s information was between those lines. You can do something similar depending on how your information is arranged. You can iterate through the lines of the file with:

validation = False
for line in file:
   if email in line:
      validation = True
      while line != "---------------":
         print(line, end="")

if validation == False:
  print("This email doesn't exist in our records.")

answered Jan 25, 2020 at 21:10

PABLO I. OCHOA

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1 Comment

Olvin Roght Over a year ago

There's for .. else statement in python which designed specially for this purpose.

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