[Tutor] raw string notation.

[Israel Evans]

Hi there good people!

I'm performing a regular expression search and I'm running into some
problems with the Raw String Notation.

when I type a string and I don't want any meta characters read as
metacharacters, I thought that typing r in front of the quotes.  However in
this particular circumstance, this doesn't seem to work

dir = r'c:\temp\test\'             #<--- this last single quote seems 
                                         # to be getting escaped by the
preceding slash
SyntaxError: invalid token    #<--- hence this error.

Any ideas?

What I'm trying to do overall is to search through a directory for files,
with any one of a defined set of extensions and do something with each in
turn.

So first I made this little wordswapper module that goes like this....

#! % python wordswap

import fileinput, re

filename = raw_input('What is the name of the file? >> ')
oldword = raw_input('What is the old word? >> ')
newword = raw_input('What is the new word? >> ')

pat = re.compile(oldword)

def doswap(line):
    newline = pat.sub(newword, line)
    print newline,

def wordswap():
    for line in fileinput.input(filename, 1):
        doswap(line)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    wordswap()
    raw_input('press any key to end')

Then I plan to modify this so that I ask for a directory, the old word and
the new word. Then look through that Directory for any files with extensions
.txt .blah and so on.

I was trying to use glob.glob(directory + searchpattern) to do this, but I
think this is the wrong approach..

Any Ideas?

Thanks a bundle!

~Israel~