I have a list of simple names such as Márquez,
because of the á (?< name >[a-zA-Z]+) doesn't seem to be working!
Help would be very much appreciated!
views:
112answers:
3don't see a word about Python in that link
SilentGhost
2010-03-09 19:11:15
Regular expression usage differs between implementations. Article that tells nothing about Python regexp implementation won't give reliable information about using regexps in python.
Jacek Konieczny
2010-03-09 19:43:55
omg! The link explains some Unicode problems I had in the past... thanks
RadiantHex
2010-03-09 20:56:02
+3
A:
you could use
\w+
with the unicode flag. I assume there's no risk of having digits or underscore in your names.
>>> re.findall('\w+', 'Márquez', re.U)
['Márquez']
You also seem to be missing P after the question mark: (?P< name >[a-zA-Z]+)
SilentGhost
2010-03-09 19:07:28
This doesn't look good for Python < 3.0 – I don't like the idea of using the UNICODE option with regular (non-unicode) strings.
Jacek Konieczny
2010-03-09 19:46:21
In Python 2.x str type and "xxxx" literal contains just a string of bytes. This bytes may be some characters in a specific encoding, but without encoding information these are just bytes. 'Márquez' is: (77, 195, 161, 114, 113, 117, 101, 122) (8 bytes) if your encoding is 'utf-8' or (77, 225, 114, 113, 117, 101, 122) (7 bytes) if the encoding is ISO 8859-1. And the same value would be "Mαrquez" when decoded in ISO 8859-7. The same bytes, different characters. Without knowing the encoding we cannot talk about Unicode characters.
Jacek Konieczny
2010-03-09 20:30:47
@SilentGhost: thanks for the great reply. But what if I wanted to include spaces, '.'s and ','s ?
RadiantHex
2010-03-09 20:57:13
A:
For Python < 3 you may want to enable locale:
import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, '')
And then use re.LOCALE option with your regexpes:
re.findall('\w+', 'Márquez', re.LOCALE)
Though, probably Unicode is the better way to go, though it requires decoding the data from and encoding it to your local encoding.
Jacek Konieczny
2010-03-09 19:42:04