techscapades

After pulling most of my hair out, I realized a simple mistake in my Python regular expression usage. I had been trying to search a simple HTML document for some text, which happened to be broken across a newline such as:

  <div>I'm some
               fancy text that needs
               to be found</div>

I tried my very simple pattern match using the re.MULTILINE flag to no avail. The solution ended up being:

  import re
  pattern = re.compile('some\s*fancy', re.DOTALL)
  match = pattern.search(input_text)

re.MULTILINE is not the same as re.DOTALL. Use DOTALL if you want your dot to match everything, including new lines. See more at this handy dandy reference site.

Doh!

4 Responses

1. Tom L Says:
   February 14th, 2010 at 11:34 am

   Thanks, Mike. I was trying re.MULTILINE over and over wondering what I was missing.

   And google found your post. Bless you.

2. Steve Says:
   March 15th, 2010 at 3:39 pm

   Ditto. Thanks!

3. Etan Says:
   March 27th, 2010 at 8:20 am

   many thanks guy!

4. Egon Says:
   September 1st, 2010 at 1:47 pm

   Many thanks!
   Good example, good explanation.