Regular expressions in Python

[johnvert at my-deja.com]

Hello,

I have a few questions regarding the usage of regular expressions in
Python.

1)  In Perl, I can do something like

    if (/START(.+?)END/) {
      use $1 here (value caught in (.+?))
    }

    what is the equivalent of Perl's $1, $2, ... in Python.

2)  This question is not directly related to regular expressions,
but        more to parsing text in Python in general:

    I want to capture stuff between START and END, like in the
above         regular expression, but START, the stuff in the middle,
and END are      not necessarily on the same line.  The only way I can
think of is to     read the whole file into memory as a string, and
operate on that         string, or read it with readlines() and join()
those to a string.        Both of these approaches would be slow because
the file would be         read in one slurp.  Is there a way to handle
this `multiple line'        parsing in a way that I can read the file
line by line, as in:

    while 1:
      line = file.readline()
      # parse

Thank you very much.
 -- john
print 'Just another Python programmer.'


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