[Tutor] Learning Regular Expressions

[DirkJSoren@gmail.com]

Thanks Bob,





OK. The escape character \ still is active in escaping the next 
character or space when inside of triple quotes. So, I guess when the 
program is running, since I am not printing these things out, I don't 
care if anything in my notes is escaped unless it is a strategic single 
or double quote....thus disrupting the bubble of the comment formed by 
such triple quotes.

Speaking of single and double quotes, I noticed that I had used two 
single ' to surround some things, so I changed them to double quotes so 
as not to confuse my triple quotes. Then I noticed that I had also used 
contractions with ' apostrophes which would also mess up my comment 
bubble, so I got rid of those also. As far as I can tell, the triple 
single quotes (''') should work at that point. In fact, they do if I 
wrap this whole section in a print( ) statement and paste it into IDLE 
SHELL. But! I found as soon as I had IDLE run my script I got the same 
error.

Here is where I am at now with this script:   (NOTE:  I have the final 
solution below this listing.)

#!/usr/bin/env python3

'''
Regular Expressions - or at least some

Identifiers:

\d  any number
\D  anything but a number (digit)
\s  space
\S  anything but a space
\w  any character
\W  anything but a character
\.   any character (or even a period itself if you use \.) except for a 
newline
\a   search for just the letter "a"
\b  the white space around words

Modifiers
{x}    we are expecting "x" number of something
{1, 3}  we are expecting 1-3 in length of something -, so for digits we 
write  \d{1-3}
+  means Match 1 or more
?  means Match 0 or 1
*   Match 0 or more
$  Match the end of a string
^  Match the beginning of a string
|   Match either or   - so you might write  \d{1-3} | \w{5-6}
[ ]  a range or "variance" such as [A-Z] or [A-Za-z] Cap 1st letter 
followed by lower case
             or [1-5a-qA-Z] starts with a number inclusive of 1-5 then 
lower case letter then
             followed by any Cap letter! :)

White Space Characters  (may not be seen):
\n  new line
\s  space
\t   tab
\e  escape
\f  form feed
\r  return

DO NOT FORGET!:
.  +  *  ?  [  ]  $  ^  (  )  {  }  |  \    if you really want to use 
these, you must escape them

'''

I was not getting a line number for the error because I was running it 
only from IDLE and I was looking only at the commented area...as that 
now was the only thing left in the script....or was it? It hadn't 
occurred to me to try the linux command line.  When I called it from the 
Linux Console, I got:

[justme at ispy] ~/python_work$ python3 RE-1.py
   File "RE-1.py", line 69

     ^
SyntaxError: EOF while scanning triple-quoted string literal
[justme at ispy] ~/python_work$

Which puzzled me, as I didn't have 69 lines!  And guess what I found 
when I scrolled down past the end of my script? Way down out of sight 
below my program was  a single  ''' setting down there all by it's 
lonesome self!  -a fragment of me changing things all over the place 
trying to figure out what was going wrong....it had slipped below my 
line of sight and with further chances continued to work it's way down 
the page.

I think all these fixes...this solves my problem!  Thanks for your time 
and help!  :)