"Diez B. Roggisch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > David C. Ullrich schrieb: >> Say I want to replace 'disc' with 'disk', but only >> when 'disc' is a complete word (don't want to change >> 'discuss' to 'diskuss'.) The following seems almost >> right: >> >> [^a-zA-Z])disc[^a-zA-Z] >> >> The problem is that that doesn't match if 'disc' is at >> the start or end of the string. Of course I could just >> combine a few re's with |, but it seems like there should >> (or might?) be a way to simply append a \A to the first >> [^a-zA-Z] and a \Z to the second. > > Why not > > ($|[\w])disc(^|[^\w]) > > I hope \w is really the literal for whitespace - might be something > different, see the docs.
No, \s is the literal for whitespace. http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/re-syntax.html But how about: text = re.sub(r"\bdisc\b", "disk", text_to_be_changed) \b is the "word break" character, it matches at the beginning or end of any "word" (where a word is any sequence of \w characters, and \w is any alphanumeric character or _). Note that this solution still doesn't catch "Disc" if it is capitalized. Russ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
