On May 9, 1:39 pm, "Michael Yanowitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello: > > If I have a long string (such as a Python file). > I search for a sub-string in that string and find it. > Is there a way to determine if that found sub-string is > inside single-quotes or double-quotes or not inside any quotes? > If so how? > > Thanks in advance: > Michael Yanowitz
I think the .find() method returns the index of the found string. You could check one char before and then one char after the length of the string to see. I don't use regular expressions much, but I'm sure that's a more elegant approach. This will work. You'll get in index error if you find the string at the very end of the file. s = """ foo "bar" """ findme = "foo" index = s.find(findme) if s[index-1] == "'" and s[index+len(findme)] == "'": print "single quoted" elif s[index-1] == "\"" and s[index+len(findme)] == "\"": print "double quoted" else: print "unquoted" ~Sean -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list