Help with RegExps

[Chris...]

Hello Alex...

  Thanks for your solution!

  I wasn't aware of a function as substitution, that solved another problem.
Btw. if I want to add additional parameters, e.g. the color in your function f
below
is this way the only way (I'm missing partial application, higher-order functions
as in functional languages):

def createFun(color):
    return (lambda m, color = color: m.group(1) + '<font color=' + color + '>' \
                    + m.group(2) + '</font>')

and somewhere in your code:

f = createFun('blue')

Is this right?  Looks a little bit clumsy, but I don't know of a better
solution :-(

Alex wrote:

> If the text you're modifiying can't have nested brackets and bracket
> contents can't extend across lines, perhaps you could do something like
> the following:
>
> >>> import re
> >>> def f(m):return m.group(1)+'<font color=blue>'+m.group(2)+'</font>'
> ...
> >>> s='some text <a href=#someRef>ref</a> # this is a comment'
> >>> r=re.compile('(^[^<>]+|>[^>]+)(#.*)')
> >>> print re.sub(r,f,s)
> some text <a href=#someRef>ref</a> <font color=blue># this is a
comment</font>
> >>>

There are some problems with that pattern:
# at beginning of line isn't matched, two or more #'s aren't matches correctly.
I
think, there's no solution for my problem except parsing the lines.
Furthermore,
I read the file using read, not readlines, because I have to do multiline
matchings/substitutions.

  Thank you!

bye
  Chris...