convert a string to a regex?

[Chris Rebert]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Peng Yu <pengyu.ut at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are many special characters listed on
> http://docs.python.org/library/re.html
>
> I'm wondering if there is a convenient function that can readily
> convert a string with the special characters to its corresponding
> regex. For example,
>
> "some.thing" => "some\.thing"

If you'd taken 45 seconds to scan the documentation:

http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#re.escape

re.escape(string)
    Return string with all non-alphanumerics backslashed; this is
useful if you want to match an arbitrary literal string that may have
regular expression metacharacters in it.

Cheers,
Chris
--
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