regex help

[????? ????? (Shantanoo Mahajan)]

John Machin wrote:

> jeff sacksteder wrote:
>> Regex questions seem to be rather resistant to googling.
>> 
>> My regex currently looks like - 'FOO:.*\n\n'
>> 
>> The chunk of text I am attempting to locate is a line beginning with
>> "FOO:", followed by an unknown number of lines, terminating with a
>> blank line. Clearly the ".*" phrase does not match the single newlines
>> occuring inside the block.
>> 
>> Suggestions are warmly welcomed.
> 
> I suggest you read the manual first:
> """
> "."
> (Dot.) In the default mode, this matches any character except a newline.
> If the DOTALL flag has been specified, this matches any character
> including a newline.
> """

I think you need to write you own function. Something like:

for x in open('_file_name'):
     if x == 'Foo:\n':
             flag=1
     if x == '\n':
             flag=0
     if flag == 1:
             print x


if the line is 'FOO: _some_more_data_' you may try, 
if x.startswith('Foo:'):
instead of
if x == 'Foo:\n':

Hope this help.

Shantanoo