re.sub issue when using group with \number

Question

Hi,

i'm trying to use a regexp to arrange some text, with re.sub.

Let's say it's an almost csv file that I have to clean to make it totally csv.

I replaced all \t by \n doing :

t = t.replace("\n", "\t")

... and it works just fine. After that, I need to get some \t back to \n, for each of my CSV lines. I use for that this expression :

t = re.sub("\t(\d*?);", "\n\1;", t, re.U)

The problem is it works... but partially. The \n are added properly, but instead of being followed by my matching group, they are followed by a ^A (according to Vim)

I tried my regexp using a re.findall and it works juste fine... so what could be wrong according to you ?

My CSV lines are finally supposed to be like :

number;text;text;...;...;\n

Thanks for your help !

Answer 1

Your \1 is interpreted as the ascii character 1. Try using \\1 or r"\n\1;" .