I need to do something like the following:
pat = re.compile('edit[0-9]*:[0-9]*')
check = form.getfirst(pat)
(to check things like 'edit0:1') How do I do this?
Well, you can do it either as
check = pat.search(string_to_search)
which is pretty plainly detailed in the help for the "re" module,
both under the search() function and under the "8.2.2 Matching
vs. Searching" section.
Alternatively, if you plan to get the others too, you can use
fi = pat.finditer(string_to_search)
check = fi.next().group(0) # beware this may throw
# a StopIteration if there are no more matches.
which would usually be done inside a loop where the StopIteration
does the Right Thing(tm).
But if you're using it on HTML form text, regexps are usually the
wrong tool, and you should be using an HTML parser (such as
BeautifulSoup) that knows how to handle odd text and escapings
better and more robustly than regexps will.
-tkc
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