Limits on search length

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Daryl Lee <dlee at altaregos.com> writes:

> I am trying to locate all lines in a suite of files with quoted
> strings of particular lengths.  A search pattern like r'".{15}"'
> finds 15-character strings very nicely.  But I have some very long
> ones, and a pattern like r'".{272}"' fails miserably, even though I
> know I have at least one 272-character string.

It seems to work for me.  Which version of Python are you using?

Here is how I tested it.  First, I modified your program so that it
actually runs (sys and re imports were missing) and removed
unnecessary globbing and file opening:

import sys, re

searchPattern  = sys.argv[1]
cpat = re.compile(searchPattern)

lineNumber = 0
for line in sys.stdin:
    lineNumber += 1
    m = cpat.search(line)
    if m is not None:
        print "(", lineNumber, ")", line

Now, create a file with three lines, each with a string of different
length:

$ printf '"%*s"\n' 271 > fl
$ printf '"%*s"\n' 272 >> fl
$ printf '"%*s"\n' 273 >> fl

And run the script:

$ python scriptfile '".{272}"' < fl
( 2 ) "[... 272 blanks]"

That looks correct to me.

> In the short term, I can resort to locating the character positions
> of the quotes,

You can also catch all strings and only filter those of the length you
care about.