[Tutor] finding special character string

[Kent Johnson]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Marilyn Davis <marilyn at deliberate.com> wrote:
> On Sun, June 1, 2008 10:30 am, Alan Gauld wrote:
>
>> "Kent Johnson" <kent37 at tds.net> wrote
>>
>>
>>> Assuming the strings are non-overlapping, i.e. the closing "." of
>>> one string is not the opening "." of another, you can find them all with
>>> import re re.findall(r'\..*?\.', text)
>>
>> Hmm, my regex hopelessness comes to the fore again.
>> Why a *?
>> I would probably have guessed the pattern to be
>>
>>
>> \..+?\.

Mine will find two adjacent periods with no intervening text, yours
won't. Whether this makes any difference to the OP, or which is
correct, I don't know.

> This little program includes a function to test regular expressions.  I
> find it helpful and I give it to students.  I think such programs exist on
> the net.

I am always surprised at how many regex testers there are, because a
simple tester comes with Python. It is called redemo.py; look for it
in the Tools/scripts  or bin/ directory installed with Python. On my
Mac it is at /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/bin/redemo.py.

Kent