Alan has pointed out that your loop here: for line_in in file.readline(): ...
has a much different meaning that the one you intend. It means: "for every character in the first line of the file: ..." The reason is because "file.readline()" returns a line of your file as a string. A string is a sequence of characters. Loops work on sequences of things, so in the loop above, it will walk over the sequence of characters. That being said, if you're trying to parse HTML with regular expressions, you probably want to reconsider. Instead, you might want to look into a dedicated parser for that task such as Beautiful Soup. http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ The problem with a regular expressions approach is that it's easy to code up a fragile, broken solution. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor