Tim Chase wrote: > > My template outside of the '%s' characters contains only commas and > > spaces, and within, neither commas nor spaces. Given that information, > > is there any reason it might not work properly? > > Given this new (key) information along with the assumption that > you're doing straight string replacement (not dictionary > replacement of the form "%(key)s" or other non-string types such > as "%05.2f"), then yes, a reversal is possible. To make it more > explicit, one would do something like > > >>> template = '%s, %s, %s' > >>> values = ('Tom', 'Dick', 'Harry') > >>> formatted = template % values > >>> import re > >>> unformat_string = template.replace('%s', '([^, ]+)') > >>> unformatter = re.compile(unformat_string) > >>> extracted_values = unformatter.search(formatted).groups() > > using '[^, ]+' to mean "one or more characters that aren't a > comma or a space". > > -tkc
Thanks. One more thing (I forgot to mention this other situation earlier) The %s characters are ints, and outside can be anything except int characters. I do have one situation of '%s%s%s', but I can change it to '%s', and change the output into the needed output, so that's not important. Think something along the lines of "abckdaldj iweo%s qwierxcnv !%sjd". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list