Thanks everyone, esp this gentleman. The solution that worked best for me is just to use a DOT before the string as the one at the beginning of the line did not have any char before it. I guess, this requires the ability to ignore the CARAT as the beginning of the line.
I am a satisfied custormer. No need for returns. :) On Oct 25, 7:11 pm, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote: > Rivka Miller <rivkaumil...@gmail.com> writes: > > On Oct 25, 2:27 pm, Danny <dann90...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Why you just don't give us the string/input, say a line or two, and > >> what you want off of it, so we can tell better what to suggest > > > no one has really helped yet. > > Really? I was going to reply but then I saw Janis had given you the > answer. If it's not the answer, you should just reply saying what it is > that's wrong with it. > > > I want to search and modify. > > Ah. That was missing from the original post. You can't expect people > to help with questions that weren't asked! To replace you will usually > have to capture the single preceding character. E.g. in sed: > > sed -e 's/\(.\)$hello\$/\1XXX/' > > but some RE engines (Perl's, for example) allow you specify zero-width > assertions. You could, in Perl, write > > s/(?<=.)\$hello\$/XXX/ > > without having to capture whatever preceded the target string. But > since Perl also has negative zero-width look-behind you can code your > request even more directly: > > s/(?<!^)\$hello\$/XXX/ > > > I dont wanna be tied to a specific language etc so I just want a > > regexp and as many versions as possible. Maybe I should try in emacs > > and so I am now posting to emacs groups also, although javascript has > > rich set of regexp facilities. > > You can't always have a universal solution because different PE > implementations have different syntax and semantics, but you should be > able to translate Janis's solution of matching *something* before your > target into every RE implementation around. > > > examples > > > $hello$ should not be selected but > > not hello but all of the $hello$ and $hello$ ... $hello$ each one > > selected > > I have taken your $s to be literal. That's not 100 obvious since $ is a > common (universal?) RE meta-character. > > <snip> > -- > Ben. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list