[Tutor] Regex question

[Steve Willoughby]

On 29-Mar-11 23:55, Alan Gauld wrote:
> ""Andrés Chandía"" <andres at chandia.net> wrote
>> in perl there is a way to reference previous registers,
>> $text =~ s/<u>(l|L|n|N)<\/u>/$1e/g;
>
>> I'm looking for the way to do it in python


If you're using just a straight call to re.sub(), it works like this:

	text = re.sub(r'<u>(l|L|n|N)</u>', '\1e', text)

You use \1, \2, etc. for backreferences just like all the other 
regex-based editors do (Perl's more of an exception than the rule there).

Alternatively, you can pre-compile the regular expression into an object:
	pattern = re.compile(r'<u>(l|L|n|N)</u>')

and then substitute by calling its sub() method:

	text = pattern.sub('\1e', text)
-- 
Steve Willoughby / steve at alchemy.com
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
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