Search File And Find Exact Match And Print Line?

Question

I searched around but i couldn't find any post to help me fix this problem, I found similar but i couldn't find any thing addressing this alone anyway.

Here's the the problem I have, I'm trying to have a python script search a text file, the text file has numbers in a list and every number corresponds to a line of text and if the raw_input match's the exact number in the text file it prints that whole line of text. so far It prints any line containing the the number.

Example of the problem, User types 20 then the output is every thing containing a 2 and a 0, so i get 220 foo 200 bar etc. How can i fix this so it just find "20"

here is the code i have

num = raw_input ("Type Number : ")
search = open("file.txt")
for line in search:
 if num in line:
  print line 

Thanks.

Answer 1

To check for an exact match you would use num == line. But line has an end-of-line character \n or \r\n which will not be in num since raw_input strips the trailing newline. So it may be convenient to remove all whitespace at the end of line with

line = line.rstrip()

---

with open("file.txt") as search:
    for line in search:
        line = line.rstrip()  # remove '\n' at end of line
        if num == line:
            print(line )