Question about a regular expression

[Darrell]

This doesn't work if you have nested parens.

>>> s='(1(2))'
>>> print re.search(r"\((.*?)\)",s).groups()
('1(2',)
>>>

Look on deja for 'ASCII delimited files' , which has this same problem.

--
--Darrell
"Rob Hodges" <s323140 at student.uq.edu.au> wrote in message
news:m3puvztau2.fsf at phaedrus.zen.xom...
> Rob Hodges <s323140 at student.uq.edu.au> writes:
>
> > Yoav I H Parish <parish at ikb.mavt.ethz.ch> writes:
> >
> > > i have a string which could look something like
> > >
> > >     a(x,y)b(x)
> > >     or
> > >     c(x,y,z)b(x)a(x,y)
> [...]
> > I'd use a regexp (.*?) to grab the entire contents of each paren pair,
>
> Aarghh!  Of course, I meant r"\((.*?)\)" -- you need the real parens as
> well as the grouping parens.  Oops,
>
> -Rob
>
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