Using variable in regex expression - escape characters

Asked Dec 06 '17 at 13:56

Active Dec 06 '17 at 13:56

Viewed 25 times

I have a paragraph of text and a list of substrings from that text which I want to replace with a different substring.

newstring = "foo"
re_word = r'{0}'.format(word)
text = re.sub(re_word, newstring, text)

I'm doing this with a number of different 'paragraphs' of text. For some paragraphs it works fine, but for others I get the following error from the final line:

sre_constants.error: missing ), unterminated subpattern at position 10

I suspect that the string I'm looking for contains a character that confuses Regex, ie. I need to escape it. How might I get around that?

asked Dec 06 '17 at 13:56

mosh.jinton

2

Why use a regex here? Use `text = text.replace(word, newstring)` – Wiktor Stribiżew Dec 06 '17 at 13:57
I was doing that originally, but I want to use re.IGNORECASE. – mosh.jinton Dec 06 '17 at 13:58
1

Ok, good, so use `re.escape`. See the linked thread. – Wiktor Stribiżew Dec 06 '17 at 13:59
That's solved it. Thanks! – mosh.jinton Dec 06 '17 at 14:01

Using variable in regex expression - escape characters

0 Answers0