Carsten Haese wrote: > On Wed, 2007-09-26 at 15:42 +0000, james_027 wrote: > >> hi, >> >> how do I regex that could check on any of the value that match any one >> of these ... 'jan', 'feb', 'mar', 'apr', 'may', 'jun', 'jul', 'aug', >> 'sep', 'oct', 'nov', 'dec' >> > > Why regex? You can simply check if the given value is contained in the > set of allowed values: > > >>>> s = set(['jan', 'feb', 'mar', 'apr', 'may', 'jun', 'jul', 'aug', >>>> > 'sep', 'oct', 'nov', 'dec']) > >>>> 'jan' in s
Also, check calendar for a locale aware (vs hardcoded) version: >>> import calendar >>> [calendar.month_abbr[i].lower() for i in range(1,13)] ['jan', 'feb', 'mar', 'apr', 'may', 'jun', 'jul', 'aug', 'sep', 'oct', 'nov', 'dec'] If you still want to use regexes, you can do something like: >>> import re >>> pattern = '(?:%s)' % '|'.join(calendar.month_abbr[1:13]) >>> pattern '(?:Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)' >>> re.search(pattern, "we are in september", re.IGNORECASE) <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb7ced640> >>> re.search(pattern, "we are in september", re.IGNORECASE).group() 'sep' If you want to make sure that the month name begins a word, use the following pattern instead: >>> pattern = r'(?:\b%s)' % r'|\b'.join(calendar.month_abbr[1:13]) >>> pattern '(?:\\bJan|\\bFeb|\\bMar|\\bApr|\\bMay|\\bJun|\\bJul|\\bAug|\\bSep|\\bOct|\\bNov|\\bDec)' If in doubt, Google for "regular expressions in python" or go to http://docs.python.org/lib/module-re.html Regards, Pablo -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
