Sean Brown <sbrown.h...@[spammy]gmail.com> wrote: > The problem is it appears that python is escaping the \ in the regex > because I see this: > >>>reg = '\[\[(.*)\]\];'
The first trick of working with regexes in Python is to *always* use raw strings. Instead of reg = '\[\[(.*)\]\];' you want reg = r'\[\[(.*)\]\];' In this case, I think it ends up not mattering, but it's one less thing to worry about. Next, when looking at something like > >>> reg > '\\[\\[(.*)\\]\\];' it's hard to see exactly what all the backslashes mean. Which are real and which are escapes? Try doing >>> print reg \[\[(.*)\]\]; which gets you the str(reg) instead of repr(reg). Another trick when you're not 100% what you're looking at is to explode the string like this: >>> [c for c in reg] ['\\', '[', '\\', '[', '(', '.', '*', ')', '\\', ']', '\\', ']', ';'] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list