Dynamic text color

[MRAB]

Dave McCormick wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:18 AM, John Posner <jjposner at optimum.net 
> <mailto:jjposner at optimum.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:54:44 -0500, Dave McCormick
>     <mackrackit at gmail.com <mailto:mackrackit at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         But it is not what I am wanting. I first thought to make it look
>         for a space but that would not work when a single character like
>         "#" is to be colored if there is a "string" of them.  Or if all
>         of the characters between quotes are to be colored.
> 
> 
>     Regular expressions are good at handling searches like:
> 
>     * all the characters between quotes
>     * the two-character string "do", but only if it's a complete word
> 
>     -John
> 
>     -- 
>     http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> 
> I need another hint...
> 
> Been doing some reading and playing and it looks like
> r'\bxxx\b'
> is what I need. But I can not figure out how to pass a variable between
> \b___\b
> If the word in question is between the "\b \b" and in the list then it 
> works like I want it to.
>  The below does not work.
> 
>     greenList_regexp = "|".join(greenList)
>     for matchobj in re.finditer(r'\bgreenList_regexp\b', complete_text):
>         start,end = matchobj.span()
> 
The regex r'\bgreenList_regexp\b' will match the string
'greenList_regexp' if it's a whole word.

What you mean is "any of these words, provided that they're whole
words". You'll need to group the alternatives within "(?:...)", like
this:

     r'\b(?:' + greenList_regexp + ')\b'