Hi, I'm looking for a little advice about regular expressions. I want to capture a string of text that falls between an opening squre bracket and a closing square bracket (e.g., "[" and "]") but I've run into a small problem.
I've been using this: '''\[(.*?)\]''' as my pattern. I was expecting this to be greedy but the funny thing is that it's not greedy enough in some situations. Here's my problem: The end of my string sometimes contains a cross reference to a section in a book and the subsections are cited using square brackets exactly like the one I'm using as the ending point in my original regular expression. E.g., the text string in my data looks like this: <core:emph typestyle="it">see</core:emph> discussion in § 512.16[3][b]] But my regular expression is stopping after the first "]" so after I add the new markup the output looks like this: <core:emph typestyle="it">see</core:emph> discussion in § 512.16[3]</fn:note>[b]] So the last subsection is outside of the note tag. I want something like this: <core:emph typestyle="it">see</core:emph> discussion in § 512.16[3][b]]</fn:note> I'm not sure how to make my capture more greedy so I've resorted to cleaning up the data after I make the first round of replacements: data = re.sub(r'''\[(\d*?)\]</fn:note>\[(\w)\]\]''', '''[\1][\2]]</fn:note>''', data) There's got to be a better way but I'm not sure what it is. Thanks, Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
