extracting part of a text in a file

[mahmoodn]

Hi,
I am new to python. I have a file in my $HOME (say a.tcl). I want to extract something from it with a pattern and assign that to a variable. So:

Content of /home/mahmood/a.tcl is:

...
set ckptdir $::env(SIM)/checkpoints
...

Suppose that $SIM is also defined in bash.rc.

I know that in shell, I can do something like this:

CKPT_DIR=`grep "^ckptdir" $HOME/a.tcl | sed -e "s/ckptdir"`

How can I do that in python?

[bvdet]

Maybe I'm just dense, but I cannot tell what you are trying to do. Maybe it's because I'm on Windows and not familiar with your operating system. If you can show me a sample file content and what you want to read from it, I would like to help.

[mahmoodn]

I found it... I have to open the file ans search for that pattern. Something like this:

infile = open("my_text.txt","r")
text = infile.read()
infile.close()
 
search = "Fred"
index = text.find(search)
print search, "found at index", index