On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:11:53 -0500, monkeys paw wrote: >> if I have a string such as '<td>01/12/2011</td>' and i want to reformat >> it as '20110112', how do i pull out the components of the string and >> reformat them into a YYYYDDMM format? > > data = '<td>01/12/2011</td>' > # Throw away tags. > data = data[4:-5] > # Separate components. > day, month, year = data.split('/') > # Recombine. > print(year + month + day) > > > No need for the sledgehammer of regexes for cracking this peanut.
Agreed. But "Just 'Cause"(tm), and in order to get in some regex practice: from re import compile regex = compile("(\d\d)/(\d\d)/(\d{4})") for match in regex.finditer(data): day, month, year = match.groups() print(year + month + day) Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list