local greediness ???

tygerc at gmail.com tygerc at gmail.com
Wed Apr 19 01:09:19 EDT 2006


hi, all. I need to process a file with the following format:
$ cat sample
[(some text)2.3(more text)4.5(more text here)]
[(aa bb ccc)-1.2(kdk)12.0(xxxyyy)]
[(xxx)11.0(bbb\))8.9(end here)]
.......

my goal here is for each line, extract every '(.*)' (including the
round
brackets, put them in a list, and extract every float on the same line
and put them in a list.. here is my code:

	p = re.compile(r'\[.*\]$')
	num = re.compile(r'[-\d]+[.\d]*')
	brac  = re.compile(r'\(.*?\)')

	for line in ifp:
		if p.match(line):
			x = num.findall(line)
			y = brac.findall(line)
                        print x, y len(x), len(y)

Now, this works for most of the lines. however, I'm having problems
with
lines such as line 3 above (in the sample file). here, (bbb\)) contains
an escaped
')' and the re I use will match it (because of the non-greedy '?'). But
I want this to
be ignored since it's escaped. is there a such thing as local
greediness??
Can anyone suggest a way to deal with this here.. 
thanks.




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