Matching Strings

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:17:31 -0800, James Stroud wrote:

> Assuming item is "(u'ground water',)"
> 
> import re
> item = re.compile(r"\(u'([^']*)',\)").search(item).group(1)

Using a regex is a lot of overhead for a very simple operation.

If item is the string "(u'ground water',)"

then item[3:-3] will give "ground water".

>>> import re, timeit
>>> item = "(u'ground water',)"

>>> timeit.Timer('item[3:-3]', 'from __main__ import item').repeat()
[0.56174778938293457, 0.53341794013977051, 0.53485989570617676]

>>> timeit.Timer( \
... '''re.compile(r"\(u'([^']*)',\)").search(item).group(1)''', \
... 'from __main__ import item; import re').repeat() 
[9.2723720073699951, 9.2299859523773193, 9.2523660659790039]


However, as many others have pointed out, the Original Poster's problem
isn't that item has leading brackets around the substring he wants, but
that it is a tuple.



-- 
Steven.