multiline regular expression (replace)

[Steve Holden]

Zdenek Maxa wrote:
> half.italian at gmail.com wrote:
>> On May 29, 2:03 am, Zdenek Maxa <zdenekm... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>   
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I would like to perform regular expression replace (e.g. removing
>>> everything from within tags in a XML file) with multiple-line pattern.
>>> How can I do this?
>>>
>>> where = open("filename").read()
>>> multilinePattern = "^<tag> .... <\/tag>$"
>>> re.search(multilinePattern, where, re.MULTILINE)
>>>
>>> Thanks greatly,
>>> Zdenek
>>>     
>> Why not use an xml package for working with xml files?  I'm sure
>> they'll handle your multiline tags.
>>
>> http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm
>> http://codespeak.net/lxml/
>>
>> ~Sean
>>
>>   
> 
> Hi,
> 
> that was merely an example of what I would like to achieve. However, in 
> general, is there a way for handling multiline regular expressions in 
> Python, using presumably only modules from distribution like re?
> 
> Thanks,
> Zdenek

So you mean you don't know how to *create* multiline patterns?

One way is to use """ ... """ or ''' ... ''' quoting, which allows you 
to include newlines as part of your strings. Another is to use \n in 
your strings to represent newlines.

regards
  Steve
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