Regex help

[Peter Hansen]

> David A McInnis wrote:
> 
> Is there a more efficient way to do this.  It seams like this is executing the search twice.
> 
>     patt = re.compile("fax<br>\s*([0-9]{3,3}-[0-9]{3,3}-[0-9]{4,4})", re.I)
>     if patt.search(tststring):
>         faxnum = patt.search(tststring).group(1)
>         print faxnum
> I cannot just do
>     faxnum = patt.search(tststring).group(1)
> 
> because if there is no match, it returns an error

You could just encapsulate it in a try/except to catch the AttributeError
you get when it fails.

try:
  print patt.search(tststring).group(1)
except AttributeError:
  pass

-- 
----------------------
Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
peter at engcorp.com