I need to extract the quoted text from : _("get this") The following works: re.compile( "_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" ) However, I don't want to match if there is A-Z or a-z or 0-9 or _ immediately preceding the "_" so I have tried: "[^0-9a-zA-Z]*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" "[^\w]{0,1}_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" "\W*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
to match against: skip this text _("get this") Thanks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list