regex that is equivalent to perl's syntax

[Lee Sander]

hi,
does python's re library have a similar capability of the perls
regular expression to
search for pattern that appears a variable number of times within the
lower and upper bounds given? For example, what is the python's
equivalent to the following perl's search string?
m/^\S{1,8}\.\S{0,3}/
which seeks to find all strings with 8 characters followed by a dot
and then three more characters as in filename.txt

Actually, i need to find a pattern such as ABCDXLMNO with the
character X
repeated 5 to 8 times.

thanks
lee

 

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

does python's re library have a similar capability of the perls
regular expression to
search for pattern that appears a variable number of times within the
lower and upper bounds given? For example, what is the python's
equivalent to the following perl's search string?
m/^\S{1,8}\.\S{0,3}/

It is ``re.match(r'\S{1,8}\.\S{0,3}', string)``. There's something called
"documentation"…

Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

 

[Tim Chase]

does python's re library have a similar capability of the perls

regular expression to
search for pattern that appears a variable number of times within the
lower and upper bounds given? For example, what is the python's
equivalent to the following perl's search string?
m/^\S{1,8}\.\S{0,3}/
which seeks to find all strings with 8 characters followed by a dot
and then three more characters as in filename.txt

Actually, i need to find a pattern such as ABCDXLMNO with the
character X
repeated 5 to 8 times.

You're interested in the "re" library, documented here[1] which,
astonishingly, is the first result when I google for

python re library

In your particular case, the syntax is identical to perl
regexps[2] (the 2nd hit Google returns with the above query)

import re
r1 = re.compile(r'\S{1,8}\.\S{0,3}')
r2 = re.compile(r'ABCDX{5,8}LMNO')
# use r1/r2 for matching, substitution, taking over the world

Note the use of "raw" strings (doesn't matter so much in the 2nd
version, as there's nothing escaped), as suggested in the docs.

-tkc


[1] http://docs.python.org/lib/module-re.html
[2] http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html