Newbie backreference question

[paulm]

Larry Bates <lbates at syscononline.com> wrote:
> a='test string'
> print a.split()[:-1]
> 
> I'm assuming that you want the last space separated word?
> 
> Larry Bates
> 
> 
> paulm wrote:
>> Hi,
>>       In perl I can do something like:
>> 
>> $a = 'test string';
>> $a =~ /test (\w+)/;
>> $b = $1;
>> print $b . "\n";
>> 
>> and my output would be "string".
>> 
>>       How might this snippet be written in python?
>> 
>> Thanks to all...

	No, sorry - my bad. I am looking to assign the
backreference to another variable so it can be treated
seperately. So perhaps:

$a = 'test string two';
$a =~ /test \w{2}([\W\w]+)/;
$b = $1;
print $b . "\n";

producing "ring two".

	I have read the docs and faqs but remain too dense
to comprehend.

Thanks again...