On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 4:49 PM, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: > Instead of "\S" I'd recommend using "[^\]]", or using a lazy repetition > "\S+?".
Preferably the former. The core problem is that the regex matches ambiguously on the problem string. Lazy repetition doesn't remove that ambiguity; it merely attempts to make the module prefer the match that you prefer. Other notes to the OP: Always use raw strings (r'') when writing regex patterns, to make sure the backslashes are escape characters in the pattern rather than in the string literal. The '^foo|bar$' construct you're using is wonky. I think you're writing this to mean "match if the entire string is either 'foo' or 'bar'". But what that actually matches is "anything that either starts with 'foo' or ends with 'bar'". The correct way to do the former would be either '^foo$|^bar$' or '^(?:foo|bar)$'. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
