Newbie needs regex help

[Dan M]

On Mon, 06 Dec 2010 10:29:41 -0500, Mel wrote:

> What you're missing is that string `a` doesn't actually contain four-
> character sequences like '\', 'x', 'a', 'a' .  It contains single
> characters that you encode in string literals as '\xaa' and so on.  You
> might do better with
> 
> p1 = r'([\x80-\xff])'
> r1 = re.compile (p1)
> m = r1.search (a)
> 
> I get at least an <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb749a6e0> when I try this.
> 
> 	Mel.

That's what I had initially assumed was the case, but looking at the data 
files with a hex editor showed me that I do indeed have four-character 
sequences. That's what makes this such as interesting task!