Finding the carret position in a regular expression

Tool69

Hi,
supposed I've got the following text :

mytext = "for <myvarin <somelist>:"

with the following simple pattern : pattern = "<[a-z]+>"

I use re.findall(pattern, mytext) wich returns :
['<myvar>','<somelist>']

Now, I want my prog to return the positions of the returned list
elements, ie :
<myvarwas found at position 5 in mytext
<somelistwas found at position 16 in mytext

How can I implement this ? Sorry if it's trivial, that's the first time
I use regular expressions.
Thanks,
6Tool9

Nov 23 '06 #1

Fredrik Lundh

Tool69 wrote:

supposed I've got the following text :

mytext = "for <myvarin <somelist>:"

with the following simple pattern : pattern = "<[a-z]+>"

I use re.findall(pattern, mytext) wich returns :
['<myvar>','<somelist>']

Now, I want my prog to return the positions of the returned list
elements, ie :
<myvarwas found at position 5 in mytext
<somelistwas found at position 16 in mytext

"findall" doesn't return that information; use "finditer" instead, and
use the "span" or "start" method on the returned match object to get the
position:

for m in re.finditer(pattern, mytext):
print m.span()

</F>

Nov 23 '06 #2

Tool69

Thanks Fredrik,
I was not aware of finditer. Iterators are very usefull !

Nov 23 '06 #3