Searching and replacing text ?

[Oltmans]

Hi,

I'm new to Python (and admittedly not a very good programmer) and I've
come across a scenario where I've to search and replace text in a
file.

For the sake of an example, I'm searching for every occurence of the
text
[[http://www.hotmail.com -> Hotmail]]

I've to replace it with
[http://www.hotmail.com Hotmail]

I've come up with following scheme
p=re.compile(r'\[\[')
q=re.compile(r'->')

p.sub('[',txt)
q.sub('\b',txt)

Give that I don't have very strong RegEX background, this doesn't look
very elegant. Is there some other way I can accomplish the same thing?
Moreover, please note that I'm using 'p' and 'q' for two regex and
then calling 'sub()' on both p and q. Can't I just do that by
employing one RegEx and then calling sub() only once?

Please enlighten me. Thanks in advance.