[Tutor] Regular expressions - Ignoring linefeeds

[Jerry Hill]

On 3/2/07, doug shawhan <doug.shawhan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been looking through various sites, but cannot find the magic button
> that allows me to match a string with linefeeds
> I'd rather not strip out the linefeeds, then stick them back in. :-)

Try this:

>>> s = '''Good gravy! Hi there.
I'm some text someone
wants to match.
Bye there. See you around'''

>>> snippy = re.compile('Hi there.*Bye there.', re.DOTALL)

>>> yeild = re.search(snippy, s)

>>> yeild.group()
"Hi there.\nI'm some text someone\nwants to match.\nBye there."

The important bits are compiling your regular expression with
re.DOTALL so that a dot will match newlines, and using re.search
instead of re.match.

-- 
Jerry