On Dec 21, 6:50 am, jwwest <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Anyone have any trouble pattern matching on lines returned by > readline? Here's an example: > > string = "Accounting - General" > pat = ".+\s-" > > Should match on "Accounting -". However, if I read that string in from > a file it will not match. In fact, I can't get anything to match > except ".*". > > I'm almost certain that it has something to do with the characters > that python returns from readline(). If I have this in a file: > > Accounting - General > > And do a: > > line = f.readline() > print line > > I get: > > A c c o u n t i n g - G e n e r a l > > Not sure why, I'm a nub at Python so any help is appreciated. They > look like spaces to me, but aren't (I've tried matching on spacs too) > > - james
To find out what the pseudo-spaces are, do this: print repr(open("the_file", "rb").read()[:100]) and show us (copy/paste) what you get. Also, tell us what platform you are running Python on, and how the file was created (by what software, on what platform). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list