On Friday, August 19, 2011 10:33:49 AM UTC-7, Matt Funk wrote: > number = r"\d\.\d+e\+\d+" > numbersequence = r"%s( %s){31}(.+)" % (number,number) > instance_linetype_pattern = re.compile(numbersequence) > > The results obtained are: > results: > [(' 2.199000e+01', ' : (instance: 0)\t:\tsome description')] > so this matches the last number plus the string at the end of the line, but > no > retaining the previous numbers. > > Anyway, i think at this point i will go another route. Not sure where the > issues lies at this point.
I think the problem is that repeat counts don't actually repeat the groupings; they just repeat the matchings. Take this expression: r"(\w+\s*){2}" This will match exactly two words separated by whitespace. But the match result won't contain two groups; it'll only contain one group, and the value of that group will match only the very last thing repeated: Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53) [GCC 4.5.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import re >>> m = re.match(r"(\w+\s*){2}","abc def") >>> m.group(1) 'def' So you see, the regular expression is doing what you think it is, but the way it forms groups is not. Just a little advice (I know you've found a different method, and that's good, this is for the general reader). The functions re.findall and re.finditer could have helped here, they find all the matches in a string and let you iterate through them. (findall returns the strings matched, and finditer returns the sequence of match objects.) You could have done something like this: row = [ float(x) for x in re.findall(r'\d+\.\d+e\+d+',line) ] And regexp matching is often overkill for a particular problem; this may be of them. line.split() could have been sufficient: row = [ float(x) for x in line.split() ] Of course, these solutions don't account for the case where you have lines, some of which aren't 32 floating-point numbers. You need extra error handling for that, but you get the idea. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list