Re: text processing problem

Matt wrote: 
I'd HIGHLY suggest purchasing the excellent <a
href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/index.html";>Mastering
Regular Expressions</a> by Jeff Friedl.  Although it's mostly geared
towards Perl, it will answer all your questions about regular
expressions.  If you're going to work with regexs, this is a must-have.

That being said, here's what the new regular expression should be with
a bit of instruction (in the spirit of teaching someone to fish after
giving them a fish ;-)   )

my_expr = re.compile(r'(\w+)\s*(\(\1\))')

Note the "\s*", in place of the single space " ".  The "\s" means "any
whitespace character (equivalent to [ \t\n\r\f\v]).  The "*" following
it means "0 or more occurances".  So this will now match:

"there  (there)"
"there (there)"
"there(there)"
"there                                          (there)"
"there\t(there)" (tab)
"there\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(there)"
etc.

Hope that's helpful.  Pick up the book!

M@


Thanks again. I've read a number of tutorials on regular expressions but it's something that I hardly used in the past, so gone far too rusty.

Before my post, I've tried
my_expr = re.compile(r'(\w+) \s* (\(\1\))') instead but it doesn't work, so I'm a bit stumped......

Thanks again,
Maurice
.

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