ignore special characters in python regex

[Astan Chee]

I think the re.escape did the trick.
to answer your questions:
By "ignore" i meant instead of using non-alphanumeric characters that 
have special significance in regular expression (e.g. [|\]) and treat 
them as normal strings (i.e preceded by \), but since I don't know all 
the characters in regular expression that have special significance, I 
don't know which ones to add a '\' infront of.
Thanks anyway

John Machin wrote:
> On Jul 21, 3:02 pm, Astan Chee <astan.c... at al.com.au> wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>> I'm reading text from a file (per line) and I want to do a regex using
>> these lines but I want the regex to ignore any special characters and
>> treat them like normal strings.
>> Is there a regex function that can do this?
>>     
>
> It would help if you were to say
>
> (1) what "ignore ... characters" means -- pretend they don't exist?
> (2) what are "special chararacters" -- non-alphanumeric?
> (3) what "treat them like normal strings" means
> (4) how you expect these special characters to be (a) ignored and (b)
> "treated like normal strings" /at the same time/.
>
> Cheers,
> John
>   
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