[Tutor] regex problem with colon

[Kent Johnson]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Tim Johnson<tim at johnsons-web.com> wrote:
> using python 2.5.
> I'm having a problem with including a colon as part of a substring
> bounded by whitespace or beginning of line.
> Here's an example:
> p = re.compile(r'\bcc:\b',re.IGNORECASE)
>>>> res = p.findall('malicious cc: here CC: there')
>>>> res
> []
> ## Darn! I'd hope that the 'cc:' and 'CC:' substrings would be
> found. So how to compose the expression correctly?

The problem is that : is not a "word" character, so there is no word
boundary between : and space for \b to match. How about this:
In [9]: p = re.compile(r'\bcc:',re.IGNORECASE)

In [10]: p.findall('malicious cc: here CC: there')
Out[10]: ['cc:', 'CC:']

Kent