I'd HIGHLY suggest purchasing the excellent <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/index.html";>Mastering Regular Expressions</a> by Jeff Friedl. Although it's mostly geared towards Perl, it will answer all your questions about regular expressions. If you're going to work with regexs, this is a must-have.
That being said, here's what the new regular expression should be with a bit of instruction (in the spirit of teaching someone to fish after giving them a fish ;-) )
my_expr = re.compile(r'(\w+)\s*(\(\1\))')
Note the "\s*", in place of the single space " ". The "\s" means "any whitespace character (equivalent to [ \t\n\r\f\v]). The "*" following it means "0 or more occurances". So this will now match:
"there (there)" "there (there)" "there(there)" "there (there)" "there\t(there)" (tab) "there\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(there)" etc.
Hope that's helpful. Pick up the book!
M@
Thanks again. I've read a number of tutorials on regular expressions but it's something that I hardly used in the past, so gone far too rusty.
Before my post, I've tried
my_expr = re.compile(r'(\w+) \s* (\(\1\))') instead but it doesn't work, so I'm a bit stumped......
Thanks again, Maurice -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
