simple RE?

[Andrew Kuchling]

"BA" <asdffdsa at bellatlantic.net> writes:

> the concept is that i do not care if there is leading white space or not. i
> do care that the first non-white space character is NOT a single quote. i am
>     pat_oe_ok1=r"^[^']\s*Option Explicit"
>     pat_oe_ok2=r"^\s*[^']\s*Option Explicit"

Dissect these patterns:
   ^              # Match at start of string
   [^']           # Match a single character that isn't "'"
   \s*            # Match zero or more whitespace characters
   Option Explicit# Match this literal string.

It's not really clear to me exactly what you're trying to match
because I didn't understand your explanation.  I don't see why the
simple pattern "^\s*Option Explicit" wouldn't be a suitable pattern;
you don't have to match strings like "print Option Explicit", do you?

BTW, see the Regular Expression HOWTO at
http://py-howto.sourceforge.net/regex/ ; it may explain regex patterns
in more detail than the book you're using.

--amk