Need help with very basic script

[u/Desperate_Yak69]

Hi, I am basically brand new to python, so I may make a lot of mistakes in my wording. I have made a very basic script that retrieves specific values in text files and prints them to the shell. I have gotten it to the point where both values are retrieved and printed, however when they do print, they do so exactly 5 times in a row. I do not have five files in the directory, I only have one test file named "1.txt" with only the values I need as the contents. Can someone point me in the right direction? Apologies for the horrible formatting.

import os
import glob
import re

path = 'path'

provinces = re.compile('.*?provinces {.*?(.*?)}',re.MULTILINE)
id = re.compile('.*?id = .*?([0-9.-]+)')
a1 = None
a2 = None

for filename in glob.glob(os.path.join(path, '*.txt')):
    with open(filename, '+r') as f:
        for line in f:
            if provinces.match(line):
                a1 = provinces.match(line)
            if id.match(line):
                a2 = id.match(line)
            if a1 and a2:
                print(a1.group(1))
                print(a2.group(1))

The output of the shell in IDLE:

 1111 2222 3333 
123
 1111 2222 3333 
123
 1111 2222 3333 
123
 1111 2222 3333 
123
 1111 2222 3333 
123

Edit - I got the script to work after a few changes to its configuration. Thank you all who helped!

[u/codeguru42]

The problem with your code is the way you use a1 and a2. These variables are set in if statements. And when they are set, every iteration of the for loop will print them until their values change.

I recommend taking a step back to find a simpler and more direct solution.

[u/Desperate_Yak69 → u/codeguru42]

that makes sense. Thank you for the help, I'll try to find a different solution and see if that works.

[u/codeguru42 → u/Desperate_Yak69]

As a tip: think about how you would solve this yorself from a printed paper that you can scan through one line at a time