Regex driving me crazy...

[J]

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 01:16, Kushal Kumaran
<kushal.kumaran+python at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there any particular reason you absolutely must extract the status
> message?  If you already have a list of possible status messages, you
> could just test which one of those is present in the line...

Yes and no...

Mostly, it's for the future.  Right now, this particular test script
(and I mean test script in the sense it's part of a testing framework,
not in the sense that I'm being tested on it ;-)  ) is fully
automated.

Once the self-test on the HDD is complete, the script will return
either a 0 or 1 for PASS or FAIL respectively.

However, in the future, it may need to be changed to or also handled
manually instead of automatically. And if we end up wanting it to be
automatic, then having that phrase would be important for logging or
problem determination.  We don't so much care about the rest of the
string I want to parse as the data it gives is mostly meaningless, but
having it pull things like:

Completed: Electrical error

or

Completed: Bad Sectors Found

could as useful as

Completed without error

or

Aborted by user

So that's why I was focusing on just extracting that phrase from the
output.  I could just pull the entire string and do a search for the
phrases in question, and that's probably the simplest thing to do:

re.search("Search Phrase",outputString)

but I do have a tendency to overthink things some times and besides
which, having just that phrase for the logs, or for use in a future
change would be cool, and this way, I've already got that much of it
done for later on.