Duncan Booth wrote: > Dan wrote: > > >>>My (probably to naive) approach is: p = re.compile(r'\b#include\b) >> >>I think your problem is the \b at the beginning. \b matches a word break >>(defined as \w\W or \W\w). There would only be a word break before the # >>if the preceding character were a \w (that is, [A-Za-z0-9_], and maybe >>some other characters depending on your locale). >> >>However, the \b after the "include" is exactly what you want. >> > > > So the OP probably wanted '\B' the exact opposite of '\b' for the start of > the string, i.e. only match the # if it is NOT preceded by a wordbreak. > > Alternatively for C style #includes search for r'^\s*#\s*include\b'.
Search for r'^something' can never be better/faster than match for r'something', and with a dopey implementation of search [which Python's re is NOT] it could be much worse. So please don't tell newbies to search for r'^something'. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
