Nested function scope problem

[Josiah Manson]

Thank you for your corrections to the previous code. Your regex
solution is definitely much cleaner. Referring to your other
suggestions, is the advantage of using a list of chars instead of
adding to a string just a bow to big-O complexity, or are there other
considerations? First I had tried appending to the string, but it seems
they are immutable. It seems that using a list for a string isn't a
very clear way to represent a mutable string.

Although I gladly accept that using a regex is the best solution to
this problem, I am still interested in knowing how to access the
variables in a containing function. It seems that there should be some
keyword akin to global that would expose them, or some other method. I
have read that python uses nested scopes (or at least was planning to
in 2.2), so I wonder what I am missing.