Core Python Programming

3.6. First Python Application

Now that we are familiar with the syntax, style, variable assignment and memory allocation, it is time to look at a more complex example of Python programming. Many of the things in this program will be parts of Python which may have unfamiliar constructs, but we believe that Python is so simple and elegant that the reader should be able to make the appropriate conclusions upon examination of the code.

The source file we will be looking at is fgrepwc.py, named in honor of the two Unix utilities of which this program is a hybrid. fgrep is a simple string searching command. It looks at a text file line by line and will output any line for which the search string appears. Note that a string may appear more than once ...