Hi, You can do the substitution in many ways.
You can first search for bare account numbers and substitute them with urls. Then substitute urls into <a></a> tags. To substitute account numbers that aren't in urls, you simply substitutes account numbers if they don't start with a "/", as you have been trying to do. re.sub() can accept a function instead of a string. The function receives the match object and returns a replacement. This way you can do extra processing to matches. import re text = """https://hello.com/accid/12345-12 12345-12 http://sadfsdf.com/asdf/asdf/asdf/12345-12 start12345-12end this won't be replaced start/123-45end """ def sub_num(m): if m.group(1) == '/': return m.group(0) else: # put url here return m.group(1) + 'http://example.com/' + m.group(2) >>> print re.sub(r'(\D)(\d+-\d+)', sub_num , text) https://hello.com/accid/12345-12 http://example.com/12345-12 http://sadfsdf.com/asdf/asdf/asdf/12345-12 starthttp://example.com/12345-12end this won't be replaced start/123-45end >>> _ This is assuming there isn't any <a> tags in the input, so you should do this before substituting urls into <a> tags. I have super cow powers! Moos _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
