[Tutor] regular expression question

[Alexandre Ratti]

Hello,


nihilo wrote:
> I'm stuck on a regular expression. I want to match everything
> starting  from a word up to and including the next occurence of the word.

If you are trying to match text between instances of a specific word, 
you can try using "non-greedy" forms so that the expression matches as 
little text as possible (i.e. only up to the 2nd instance and no 
further). Example:

 >>> import re
 >>> s = "Nobody expects the FNORD Spanish Inquisition FNORD and they 
have FNORD nice uniforms."
 >>> pattern = re.compile("FNORD.*?FNORD")
 >>> pattern.findall(s)
['FNORD Spanish Inquisition FNORD']

The question mark in ".*?" says it's the non-greedy form. For more 
details, see:

    http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/re-syntax.html

If you haven't found it yet, see also the Regular Expression Howto:

    http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/regex.html

If the text between word instances can contain new lines, you'll have to 
add "re.DOTALL" when compiling the expression.


Cheers.

Alexandre