Regexes: How to handle escaped characters

[John Machin]

On May 18, 8:16 am, Paul McGuire <p... at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> On May 17, 4:06 pm, John Machin <sjmac... at lexicon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On May 18, 6:00 am, Torsten Bronger <bron... at physik.rwth-aachen.de>
> > wrote:
>
> > > Hallöchen!
>
> > > James Stroud writes:
> > > > Torsten Bronger wrote:
>
> > > >> I need some help with finding matches in a string that has some
> > > >> characters which are marked as escaped (in a separate list of
> > > >> indices).  Escaped means that they must not be part of any match.

Note: "must not be *part of* any match" [my emphasis]

[big snip]
>
> Here are two pyparsing-based routines, guardedSearch and
> guardedSearchByColumn.  The first uses a pyparsing parse action to
> reject matches at a given string location

Seems to be somewhat less like what the OP might have in mind ...

While we're waiting for clarification from the OP, there's a chicken-
and-egg thought that's been nagging me: if the OP knows so much about
the searched string that he can specify offsets which search patterns
should not span, why does he still need to search it?

Cheers,
John