[Tutor] Expression matching

[Daniel Yoo]

On Wed, 9 May 2001, Sharriff Aina wrote:

> Hi! could someone help me with my Regular expression? I=B4m trying to mat=
ch
> all occurring instances of the "<img>" tag in a big chunk of HTML.
>=20
> ## my code
> import re
> aa =3D '<span>ff<td><img src>sasa<b><img src=3D"ksksk.jpg">nn<br>blah<img
> src=3D"C:\\test\test.jpg>"'
> imagematch =3D re.compile('<img src=3D".*>')
> print imagematch.match(aa)  ###  results in 'None'
> ## another try
> testmatch =3D re.compile('<img?\s+.*>')
> print testmatch.match(aa) ### results also in 'None'

Try using testmatch.search(): there's a difference!

    1.  Matching can only work if what we're looking for is at the very
beginning.

    2.  Searching can start anywhere within the string.

The documentation mentions this briefly here:

    http://python.org/doc/current/lib/matching-searching.html

but it's always a gotcha when you start off with Python regular
expressions.  Try search(), and you should get better results.