"Sean Brown" <sbrown.h...@[spammy] gmail.com> wrote in message
news:glflaj$qr...@nntp.motzarella.org...
Using python 2.4.4 on OpenSolaris 2008.11
I have the following string created by opening a url that has the
following string in it:
td[ct] = [[ ... ]];\r\n
The ... above is what I'm interested in extracting which is really a
whole bunch of text. So I think the regex \[\[(.*)\]\]; should do it.
The problem is it appears that python is escaping the \ in the regex
because I see this:
reg = '\[\[(.*)\]\];'
reg
'\\[\\[(.*)\\]\\];'
Now to me looks like it would match the string - \[\[ ... \]\];
You are viewing the repr of the string
reg='\[\[(.*)\]\];'
reg
'\\[\\[(.*)\\]\\];'
print reg
\[\[(.*)\]\]; <== these are the chars passed to regex
The slashes are telling regex the the [ are literal.
Which obviously doesn't match anything because there are no literal \ in
the above string. Leaving the \ out of the \[\[ above has re.compile
throw an error because [ is a special regex character. Which is why it
needs to be escaped in the first place.
I am either doing something really wrong, which very possible, or I've
missed something obvious. Either way, I thought I'd ask why this isn't
working and why it seems to be changing my regex to something else.
Did you try it?
s='td[ct] = [[blah blah]];\r\n'
re.search(reg,s).group(1)
'blah blah'
-Mark
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