[email protected] wrote:
> I've encountered a problem with my RegEx learning curve -- how to
> escape hash characters # in strings being matched, e.g.:
>
>>>> string = re.escape('123#abc456')
>>>> match = re.match('\d+', string)
>>>> print match
>
> <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x00A6A800>
>>>> print match.group()
>
> 123
>
> The correct result should be:
>
> 123456
>>> "".join(re.findall("\d+", "123#abc456"))
'123456'
> I've tried to escape the hash symbol in the match string without
> result.
>
> Any ideas? Is the answer something I overlooked in my lurching Python
> schooling?
re.escape() is used to build the regex from a string that may contain
characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions but that you
want to treat as literals. You can for example search for r"C:\dir" with
>>> re.compile(re.escape(r"C:\dir")).findall(r"C:\dir C:7ir")
['C:\\dir']
Without escaping you'd get
>>> re.compile(r"C:\dir").findall(r"C:\dir C:7ir")
['C:7ir']
Peter
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