Something weird about re.finditer()

Gilles Ganault nospam at nospam.com
Wed Apr 15 04:46:28 EDT 2009


Hello

	I stumbled upon something funny while downloading web pages and
trying to extract one or more blocks from a page: Even though Python
seems to return at least one block, it doesn't actually enter the for
loop:

======
re_block = re.compile('before (.+?) after',re.I|re.S|re.M)

#Here, get web page and put it into "response"

blocks = None
blocks = re_block.finditer(response)
if blocks == None:
	print "No block found"
else:
	print "Before blocks"
	for block in blocks:
		#Never displayed!
		print "In blocks"
======

Since "blocks" is no longer set to None after calling finditer()...
but doesn't contain a single block... what does it contain then?

Thank you for any tip.



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