RE: Testing for the first few letters of a string

[Edwin.Madari]

use re module

import re
template = '^My name is alex'
astring = 'My name is alex, and I like pie'
if re.match(template, astring):
print 'Found it'
else: print '%s does not begin with %s' % (astring, template)

good luck.
Edwin

-----Original Message-----
From: py************************************************ **@python.org
[mailto:py***************************************** *********@python.org]
On Behalf Of Alexnb
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 11:40 AM
To: py*********@python.org
Subject: Testing for the first few letters of a string

Okay, I have a fix for this problem, but it is messy and I think there might
be a better way. Heres an example:

Lets say I have a string: "My name is alex"

and I have another string "My name is alex, and I like pie".

I want to test to see if just the "My name is alex" part is there. I don't
care about the pie part.
My first instinct was to just create a for loop and test for the string like
this:

n = 0

for x in string1:
if string1[n] == string2[n]
n = n +0
else:
break
and then later testing to see what n was = to and figuring out if it got
through the whole loop. I feel like there should be an easier way to do
this, and probably is. So Does anyone have a suggestion?
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[John Machin]

On Aug 8, 1:53 am, [e-mail] wrote:

use re module

Using re.match instead of str.startswith is overkill.

>
import re
template = '^My name is alex'

The ^ is redundant.

astring = 'My name is alex, and I like pie'
if re.match(template, astring):
print 'Found it'
else: print '%s does not begin with %s' % (astring, template)

[magloca]

John Machin wrote:

>import re
template = '^My name is alex'

The ^ is redundant.

Didn't the OP want to match only at the beginning of the string?

m.