How to escape strings for re.finditer?

[Jen Kris]

Yes, that's it.  I don't know how long it would have taken to find that detail with research through the voluminous re documentation.  Thanks very much.  

Feb 27, 2023, 15:47 by python at mrabarnett.plus.com:

> On 2023-02-27 23:11, Jen Kris via Python-list wrote:
>
>> When matching a string against a longer string, where both strings have spaces in them, we need to escape the spaces.
>>
>> This works (no spaces):
>>
>> import re
>> example = 'abcdefabcdefabcdefg'
>> find_string = "abc"
>> for match in re.finditer(find_string, example):
>>      print(match.start(), match.end())
>>
>> That gives me the start and end character positions, which is what I want.
>>
>> However, this does not work:
>>
>> import re
>> example = re.escape('X - cty_degrees + 1 + qq')
>> find_string = re.escape('cty_degrees + 1')
>> for match in re.finditer(find_string, example):
>>      print(match.start(), match.end())
>>
>> I’ve tried several other attempts based on my reseearch, but still no match.
>>
>> I don’t have much experience with regex, so I hoped a reg-expert might help.
>>
> You need to escape only the pattern, not the string you're searching.
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