YANRQ (yet another regex question)

[Michael George Lerner]

I wanted to match this:

(?P<foo>foo    | foo   |  foo  |   foo |    foo)

without typing in all of the different combinations of 'foo' and spaces.

(Tim kindly pointed out the typos in the above, which I've corrected)

Mats Kindahl <matkin at iar.se> wrote:

> Depending on the definition of easy, this is the alternative I would
> use. 

> 	r = re.compile(r'(?P<foo>(?=.{7}) *foo *)')
> 	
> Of course, your milage may wary.

Doesn't quite work for me:

>>> import re
>>> r = re.compile(r'(?P<foo>(?=.{7}) *foo *)')
>>> s = r.match('foo         ').groupdict()['foo']
>>> s
'foo         '
>>> len(s)
12
>>> 

and I only want to match things that are seven characters long here.

It does, however, match all of the correct seven character strings, 
and I'll have to remember that trick in the future.  Thanks!

-michael