String search

[odeits]

On Feb 27, 2:17 am, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar>
wrote:
> En Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:33:44 -0200, pranav <pra... at gmail.com> escribió:
>
> > Greeting fellow pycoders,
>
> > I have a script that browses large codes and replaces certain text
> > with some other text. Of lately i observed an issue.Some of the
> > original text were like
>
> > <cfif IsDefined("attributes.SOFTPREREQ")>
> >     ,N'#attributes.SOFTPREREQ#'
> > </cfif>
>
> > My module does scan this code and suggests replacement to this code.
> > But when i use the string.replace() method, it just fails. A
> > string.find() for above code in the whole file returns code -1.
> > Where am i going wrong? I figure it could be something to do with
> > character encoding or else.
>
> Do you mean, you look for those three complete lines with a single  
> xxxx.find(...)?
> Hard to guess... maybe there is some withespace at the end of a line, some  
> additional leading whitespace in the second line, a tab character instead  
> of spaces, maybe those ' are instead ´ or `, maybe the file does not use  
> \n as a line termination, maybe the file encoding doesn't match what you  
> expect...
>
> If string.find() does return -1, it is because the text you're looking for  
> is NOT inside the string. No use in questioning that. If you think the  
> text IS there, get a decent hex editor and examine the file near the  
> supposed match, character by character, and see WHERE is the difference  
> (there MUST be a difference).
>
> --
> Gabriel Genellina

Try looking into regular expressions.... http://docs.python.org/library/re.html