On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:36 AM, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: >> On 16/12/2011 16:49, John Gordon wrote: >>> >>> According to the documentation on re.sub(), it replaces the leftmost >>> matching pattern. >>> >>> However, I want to replace the *longest* matching pattern, which is >>> not necessarily the leftmost match. Any suggestions? >>> >>> I'm working with IPv6 CIDR strings, and I want to replace the longest >>> match of "(0000:|0000$)+" with ":". But when I use re.sub() it replaces >>> the leftmost match, even if there is a longer match later in the string. >>> >>> I'm also looking for a regexp that will remove leading zeroes in each >>> four-digit group, but will leave a single zero if the group was all >>> zeroes. >>> >> How about this: >> >> result = re.sub(r"\b0+(\d)\b", r"\1", string) > > Close. > > pattern = r'\b0+([1-9a-f]+|0)\b' > re.sub(pattern, r'\1', string, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
Doh, that's still not quite right. pattern = r'\b0{1,3}([1-9a-f][0-9a-f]*|0)\b' re.sub(pattern, r'\1', string, flags=re.IGNORECASE) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list