Replace and inserting strings within .txt files with the use of regex

[Νίκος]

On 9 Αύγ, 23:17, MRAB <pyt... at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
> Νίκος wrote:
> > On 9 Αύγ, 21:05, Thomas Jollans <tho... at jollybox.de> wrote:
> >> On Monday 09 August 2010, it occurred to Νίκος to exclaim:
>
> >>> On 9 Αύγ, 19:21, Peter Otten <__pete... at web.de> wrote:
> >>>> Νίκος wrote:
> >>>>> Please tell me that no matter what weird charhs has inside ic an still
> >>>>> open thosie fiels and make the neccessary replacements.
> >>>> Go back to 2.6 for the moment and defer learning about unicode until
> >>>> you're done with the conversion job.
> >>> You are correct again! 3.2 caused the problem, i switched to 2.7 and
> >>> now i donyt have that problem anymore. File is openign okey!
> >>> it ALMOST convert correctly!
> >>> # replace tags
> >>> print ( 'replacing php tags and contents within' )
> >>> src_data = re.sub( '<\?(.*?)\?>', '', src_data )
> >>> it only convert the first instance of php tages and not the rest?
> >>> But why?
> >>http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#re.S
>
> >> You probably need to pass the re.DOTALL flag.
>
> >  src_data = re.sub( '<\?(.*?)\?>', '', src_data, re.DOTALL )
>
> > like this?
>
> re.sub doesn't accept a flags argument. You can put the flag inside the
> regex itself like this:
>
>      src_data = re.sub(r'(?s)<\?(.*?)\?>', '', src_data)
>
> (Note that the abbreviation for re.DOTALL is re.S and the inline flag is
> '(?s)'. This is for historical reasons! :-))

This is for the '.' to match any character including '\n' too right?
so no matter if the php start tag and the end tag is in different
lines still to be matched, correct?

We nned the 'raw' string as well? why? The regex doens't cotnain
backslashes.