On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 04:40:54PM -0500, Charles Hartman wrote: > find 'abca' in string 'abcabca' > > Every *single* RE I can think of misses the second instance (beginning > in position 3) in the first example, because it's eaten the beginning > of it in finding the first instance.
Lookahead will do this one, e.g.: In [39]: [m.span() for m in re.finditer(r'(?=abca)', 'abcabca')] Out[39]: [(0, 0), (3, 3)] > find longest '(a[ab])+' in string 'baabaaabba' I don't think even Perl regexps can do the second one, but I might be wrong. Neither greedy or non-greedy quantifiers will compare match length. You could get a list of all matches and pick the longest one yourself. -- Nicholas Riley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley> _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
