Can someone make me un-crazy? I have a bit of code that right now, looks like this:
status = getoutput('smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda').splitlines()[6] status = re.sub(' (?= )(?=([^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)', ":",status) print status Basically, it pulls the first actual line of data from the return you get when you use smartctl to look at a hard disk's selftest log. The raw data looks like this: # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 679 - Unfortunately, all that whitespace is arbitrary single space characters. And I am interested in the string that appears in the third column, which changes as the test runs and then completes. So in the example, "Completed without error" The regex I have up there doesn't quite work, as it seems to be subbing EVERY space (or at least in instances of more than one space) to a ':' like this: # 1: Short offline:::::: Completed without error:::::: 00%:::::: 679:::::::: - Ultimately, what I'm trying to do is either replace any space that is > one space wiht a delimiter, then split the result into a list and get the third item. OR, if there's a smarter, shorter, or better way of doing it, I'd love to know. The end result should pull the whole string in the middle of that output line, and then I can use that to compare to a list of possible output strings to determine if the test is still running, has completed successfully, or failed. Unfortunately, my google-fu fails right now, and my Regex powers were always rather weak anyway... So any ideas on what the best way to proceed with this would be? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list