Matching Strings

[James Stroud]

rshepard at nospam.appl-ecosys.com wrote:
>   I'm not sure how to change a string so that it matches another one.
> 
>   My application (using wxPython and SQLite3 via pysqlite2) needs to compare
> a string selected from the database into a list of tuples with another
> string selected in a display widget.
> 
>   An extract of the relevant code is:
> 
>     selName = self.polTree.GetItemText(selID)
>     ...  
>     for item in self.appData.polNat:
>       print 'Item: ', item, '\n', 'selName: ', selName, '\n'
>       if item == selName:
>         print '***** ', self.appData.polNat[1]
> 
>   The last comparison and print statement never work because the strings are
> presented this way:
> 
> 	Item:  (u'ground water',) 
> 	selName:  ground water
> 
>   What do I need to do to 'Item' to strip the parentheses, unicode symbol,
> single quotes, and comma? Do I want 'raw' output? If so, how do I specify
> that in the line 'if item == selName:'?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Rich

Assuming item is "(u'ground water',)"

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

James