Negative look-behind

[Bhargava]

"Paul McGuire" <ptmcg at austin.rr._bogus_.com> wrote in message news:<Zwfwc.38615$4x2.23622 at fe2.texas.rr.com>...
> "Bhargava" <bhargava78 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:e7283ab0.0406010114.51ae8b6b at posting.google.com...
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am a newbie to python and need some help.
> >
> > I am looking at doing some batch search/replace for some of my source
> > code. Criteria is to find all literal strings and wrap them up with
> > some macro, say MC. For ex., var = "somestring" would become var =
> > MC("somestring"). Literal strings can contain escaped " & \.
> >
> > But there are 2 cases when this replace should not happen:
> > 1.literal strings which have already been wrapped, like
> > MC("somestring")
> > 2.directives like #include "header.h" and #extern "C".
> >
> > I tried to use negative look-behind assertion for this purpose. The
> > expression I use for matching a literal string is
> > "((\\")|[^"(\\")])+". This works fine. But as I start prepending
> > look-behind patterns, things go wrong. The question I have is whether
> > the pattern in negative look-behind part can contain alternation ? In
> > other words can I make up a regexp which says "match this pattern x
> > only if it not preceded by anyone of pattern a, pattern b and pattern
> > c" ?
> >
> > I tried the following expression to take into account the two
> > constraints mentioned above, (?<![(#include )(#extern
> > )(MC\()])"((\\")|[^"(\\")])+". Can someone point out the mistakes in
> > this ?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Bhargava
> 
> Please check out the latest beta release of pyparsing, at
> http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net .  Your post inspired me to add the
> transformString() method to pyparsing; look at the included scanExamples.py
> program for some search-and-replace examples similar to the ones you give in
> your post.
> 
> Sincerely,
> -- Paul McGuire
Hi,

I downloaded version 1.2beta3 from sourceforge, but could not find the
scanExamples.py program. I will go thro' the documentation/examples
provided and try.

Thanks,
Bhargava