how to determine an 'open' string?

[holger krekel]

To John La Rooy wrote:
> > is this short enough for you?
> > 
> > import re
> > 
> > def quoteopen(s):
> >     quot=re.compile("(?P<quot>\"\"\"|'''|\"|').*?(?P=quot)")
> >     s=quot.sub("",s)
> >     return "'" in s or '"' in s
> 
> my other version also returns the 'open quote' but
> yours is shorter. you won :-)

NO! you lost :-/

it doesn't work because the rex tries too hard to match.
paste this to your interpreter...

quoteopen('"""a"a""')

and it will match in ".*?" pairs which yields
the wrong result.

> regexes often offer more than one might think...

especial more subtlety :-)

    holger