On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Tim Johnson<t...@johnsons-web.com> wrote: > using python 2.5. > I'm having a problem with including a colon as part of a substring > bounded by whitespace or beginning of line. > Here's an example: > p = re.compile(r'\bcc:\b',re.IGNORECASE) >>>> res = p.findall('malicious cc: here CC: there') >>>> res > [] > ## Darn! I'd hope that the 'cc:' and 'CC:' substrings would be > found. So how to compose the expression correctly?
The problem is that : is not a "word" character, so there is no word boundary between : and space for \b to match. How about this: In [9]: p = re.compile(r'\bcc:',re.IGNORECASE) In [10]: p.findall('malicious cc: here CC: there') Out[10]: ['cc:', 'CC:'] Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor