How can I exclude a word by using re?

[Peter Otten]

could ildg wrote:

> But what should I do if there are more than one hello and I only want
> to extract what's before the first "hello". For example, the raw
> string is "hi, how are you? hello I'm fine, thank you hello. that's it
> hello", I want to extract all the stuff before the first hello?

The simplest solution is to use str.split():

>>> helo = "hi, how are you? HELLO I'm fine, thank you hello. that's it"
>>> helo.split("hello", 1)[0]
"hi, how are you? HELLO I'm fine, thank you "

But regular expressions offer a similar feature:

>>> re.compile("hello", re.IGNORECASE).split(helo, 1)[0]
'hi, how are you? '

Peter