pyfzf : Python Fuzzy Finder

Introduction 📪

Programmers understand how much easier their work is when they use a tool like fzf to pick data on data pathways in mixed file systems. If you do a quick YouTube video searching, you may get a ton of information on this topic. If I told you that you could utilize this tool without ever leaving your Python coding screen while creating code, how would you react?

Especially in large-scale projects, sometimes you have to search for hours with regex etc. to select data from the texts. Using a fuzzy finder would be a smart solution to eliminate this burden. We will do this with pyfzf in the codes we wrote in Python.

Let's continue the explanation without further ado.

Requirements 🟥

Basic Requirements

The basic libraries and tools we will need are given below.

• fzf : https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
• pyfzf : https://github.com/nk412/pyfzf

Here you see a working example of pyfzf:

Setup ✅

fzf Setup

The address provided here has all the information you need to install fzf:

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

pyfzf Setup

Using pip, we will first need to install our library, pyfzf.

pip install pyfzf 

Usage 🧰

Workflow and module usage are quite straightforward. Importing the pyfzf library comes first. The imported library gets utilized to call the FzfPrompt module.

from pyfzf.pyfzf import FzfPrompt

Your fzf application on your system will be automatically found.

fzf = FzfPrompt()

If fzf cannot be found automatically, the fzf file path must be defined manually.

# example 
fzf = FzfPrompt("/usr/bin/fzf")

Sample Project: User Agent Selector 📽️

Let's create a new project folder. Let's start our project by creating a file named user_agents.txt and creating a .txt file containing hundreds of User-Agents. After saving and closing the file, we create a file named fzf_choicer.py and start writing our codes. The Foldertree of our project will be as follows.

├── fzf_choicer.py
└── user_agents.txt

The content of our user_agents.txt file should be like this. Our User-Agent list
We will provide it via this gist.

Here are a few lines of the file content:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/37.0.2062.94 Chrome/37.0.2062.94 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.85 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/600.8.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.8 Safari/600.8.9
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_4_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12H321 Safari/600.1.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.85 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.85 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.10240
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.85 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
...

First of all, we start by calling our library.

from pyfzf.pyfzf import fzfprompt
# fzf = fzfprompt('/usr/bin/fzf')
fzf = fzfprompt()

Now let's write the module where we will read the data together.

def ReadItems(filepath=''):
    with open(f'{filepath}', 'r') as rf:
        rawdata = rf.readlines()
        rawdata = [r.strip() for r in rawdata]
    return rawdata

Here, we used the module named .strip() to delete the line spaces since the data will come with the expression \n during the reading process.

Now, let's write our module that will read from the file and select the data from the stored values:

def ItemChooser(rawdata):
    data = fzf.prompt(rawdata, fzf_options='--reverse')
    choice = data[0]
    return choice

To run these functions, let's call our starter function named __main__. Those who are familiar with languages such as GO will know that this function named main is the basic initializer function. When a script runs, the function named main will always run in the background. When you run your codes within this function, you can perform optimization activities more easily. This is one way to run your programs more efficiently.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    rawdata = ReadItems('user_agents.txt')
    choice = ItemChooser(rawdata)
    print(choice)

Let's see our code in its entirety:

Now let's examine the visual of how it works:

Conlusion 🎙️

We worked to create an application using a library named pyfzf. This application allows you to import phrases into your scripts selectively from text files and big lists.

Contact 📞

You can contact me using the biolink given below:
https://linktr.ee/gokayburuc