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Regex Matching on Readline()

jwwest jwwest at gmail.com
Thu Dec 20 14:50:34 EST 2007 
Anyone have any trouble pattern matching on lines returned by
readline? Here's an example:

string = "Accounting - General"
pat = ".+\s-"

Should match on "Accounting -". However, if I read that string in from
a file it will not match. In fact, I can't get anything to match
except ".*".

I'm almost certain that it has something to do with the characters
that python returns from readline(). If I have this in a file:

Accounting - General

And do a:

line = f.readline()
print line

I get:

A c c o u n t i n g  -  G e n e r a l

Not sure why, I'm a nub at Python so any help is appreciated. They
look like spaces to me, but aren't (I've tried matching on spacs too)


- james
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