[Tutor] Regex question

[Steve Willoughby]

On 30-Mar-11 08:21, "Andrés Chandía" wrote:
>
>
> Thanks Kushal and Steve.
> I think it works,a I say "I think" because at the
> results I got a strange character instead of the letter that should appear
>
> this is
> my regexp:
>
> contents = re.sub(r'(<u>|<span style="text-decoration:
> underline;">)(l|L|n|N|t|T)(</span>|</u>)', '\2\'' ,contents)

Remember that \2 in a string means the ASCII character with the code 
002.  You need to escape this with an extra backslash:
	'\\2\''
Although it would be more convenient to switch to double quotes to make 
the inclusion of the literal single quote easier:
	"\\2'"

How does that work?  As the string is being "built", the \\ is 
interpreted as a literal backslash, so the actual characters in the 
string's value end up being:
	\2'
THAT is what is then passed into the sub() function, where \2 means to 
replace the second match.

This can be yet simpler by using raw strings:
	r"\2'"

Since in raw strings, backslashes do almost nothing special at all, so 
you don't need to double them.

I should have thought of that when sending my original answer to your 
question.  Sorry I overlooked it.

--steve


-- 
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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