how to identify and print a pattern inside an ascii file in python 2?

Question

I am trying to develop a program that can read patterns from a txt file using Python 2.x. This pattern is supposed to be a bug:

| |
###O
| |

And the pattern doesn't include the whitespaces.

So far I have come up with a way to open the txt file, read it and process the data inside of it but I can't think of a way to make Python understand this pattern as 1, instead of counting each character. I've tried regular expressions but it ended up showing an output similar to this:

| |
###O
| | 
   | |
   ###O
   | |
         | |
         ###O
         | |

Instead of just saying how many of this pattern were detected inside the file, for example:

There were 3 occurrences.

Update: So far i got this

file = open('bug.txt', 'r')
data = file.read() #read content from file to a string
occurrences = data.count('| |\n\'###O\'\n| |\n')

print('Number of occurrences of the pattern:', occurrences)

But this is not working. The file itself has the patterns 3 times but with whitespaces in between, but the whitespace is not part of the pattern and when i try to paste the pattern from the file it breaks the lines, and if i correct the pattern to | | ###O | | it shows 0 occurrences because its not really the pattern.

Answer 1

It depends on how you store your ASCII data, but if you convert it to a string you can use the python .count() function.

For example:

# define string
ascii_string = "| | ###O | | | | ###O | | | | ###O | |"
pattern = "| | ###O | |"

count = ascii_string.count(pattern)

# print count in python 3+
print("Occurrences:", count)

# print count in python 2.7
print "Occurrences:", count

This will result in:

Occurrences: 3

Answer 2

>>> import re
>>> data = '''| |
... ###O
... | |
...    | |
...    ###O
...    | |
...          | |
...          ###O
...          | |'''
>>> result = re.findall('[ ]*\| \|\n[ ]*###O\n[ ]*\| \|', data)
>>> len(result)
3
>>>

Result being occurrences.

How to do it from a file:

import re
with open('some file.txt') as fd:
    data = fd.read()
result = re.findall('[ ]*\| \|\n[ ]*###O\n[ ]*\| \|', data)
len(result)

Alternative way of doing it to accommodate for edit on OP:

>>> data = '''| |
... ###O
... | |
...    | |
...    ###O
...    | |
...          | |
...          ###O
...          | |
... | | ###O | |'''
>>> data.replace('\n', '').replace(' ', '').count('||###O||')
4
>>> 

Answer 3

I solved the problem this way.

def somefuntion(file_name):
    ascii_str = ''
    with open(file_name, 'r') as reader:
        for line in reader.readlines():
            for character in line.replace('\n', '').replace(' ', ''):
                ascii_str += str(ord(character))
        return ascii_str

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bug = somefuntion('bug.txt')
    landscape = somefuntion('landscape.txt')
    print(landscape.count(bug))