RegEx issues

[Sean Brown]

Using python 2.4.4 on OpenSolaris 2008.11

I have the following string created by opening a url that has the
following string in it:

td[ct] = [[ ... ]];\r\n

The ...  above is what I'm interested in extracting which is really a
whole bunch of text. So I think the regex \[\[(.*)\]\]; should do it.
The problem is it appears that python is escaping the \ in the regex
because I see this:
>>>reg = '\[\[(.*)\]\];'
>>> reg
'\\[\\[(.*)\\]\\];'

Now to me looks like it would match the string - \[\[ ... \]\];

Which obviously doesn't match anything because there are no literal \ in
the above string. Leaving the \ out of the \[\[ above has re.compile
throw an error because [ is a special regex character. Which is why it
needs to be escaped in the first place.

I am either doing something really wrong, which very possible, or I've
missed something obvious. Either way, I thought I'd ask why this isn't
working and why it seems to be changing my regex to something else.