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

[MRAB]

Νίκος wrote:
> 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.

Yes it does; two of them!