Regex questions seem to be rather resistant to googling.

My regex currently looks like - 'FOO:.*\n\n'

The chunk of text I am attempting to locate is a line beginning with
"FOO:", followed by an unknown number of lines, terminating with a
blank line. Clearly the ".*" phrase does not match the single newlines
occuring inside the block.

Suggestions are warmly welcomed.

jeff sacksteder wrote:[color=blue]
> Regex questions seem to be rather resistant to googling.
>
> My regex currently looks like - 'FOO:.*\n\n'
>
> The chunk of text I am attempting to locate is a line beginning with
> "FOO:", followed by an unknown number of lines, terminating with a
> blank line. Clearly the ".*" phrase does not match the single newlines
> occuring inside the block.[/color]

Include the re.DOTALL flag when you compile the regular expression.

jeff sacksteder wrote:[color=blue]
> Regex questions seem to be rather resistant to googling.
>
> My regex currently looks like - 'FOO:.*\n\n'
>
> The chunk of text I am attempting to locate is a line beginning with
> "FOO:", followed by an unknown number of lines, terminating with a
> blank line. Clearly the ".*" phrase does not match the single newlines
> occuring inside the block.
>
> Suggestions are warmly welcomed.[/color]

I suggest you read the manual first:
"""
"."
(Dot.) In the default mode, this matches any character except a newline.
If the DOTALL flag has been specified, this matches any character
including a newline.
"""

when *I* google

http://www.awaretek.com/tutorials.html#regular
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Python_Strings
http://www.regexlib.com/Default.aspx

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-re.html

http://diveintopython.org/regular_ex....html#re.intro
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/
http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming...pressions.html

also look into ActiveStateKomodo reg ex debugger ( I think WIng IDE has
it too

John Machin wrote:
[color=blue]
> jeff sacksteder wrote:[color=green]
>> Regex questions seem to be rather resistant to googling.
>>
>> My regex currently looks like - 'FOO:.*\n\n'
>>
>> The chunk of text I am attempting to locate is a line beginning with
>> "FOO:", followed by an unknown number of lines, terminating with a
>> blank line. Clearly the ".*" phrase does not match the single newlines
>> occuring inside the block.
>>
>> Suggestions are warmly welcomed.[/color]
>
> I suggest you read the manual first:
> """
> "."
> (Dot.) In the default mode, this matches any character except a newline.
> If the DOTALL flag has been specified, this matches any character
> including a newline.
> """[/color]

I think you need to write you own function. Something like:

for x in open('_file_name'):
if x == 'Foo:\n':
flag=1
if x == '\n':
flag=0
if flag == 1:
print x


if the line is 'FOO: _some_more_data_' you may try,
if x.startswith('Foo:'):
instead of
if x == 'Foo:\n':

Hope this help.

Shantanoo