从Perl到Python的正则表达式转换

Question

I would like to rewrite a small Perl programm to Python. I am processing text files with it as follows:

Input:

00000001;Root;;
00000002;  Documents;;
00000003;    oracle-advanced_plsql.zip;file;
00000004;  Public;;
00000005;  backup;;
00000006;    20110323-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000007;    20110426-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000008;    20110603-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000009;    20110701-JM-F-via-summer_school;;
00000010;      20110701-JM-F-yyy.7z.001;file;

Desired output:

00000001;;Root;;
00000002;  ;Documents;;
00000003;    ;oracle-advanced_plsql.zip;file;
00000004;  ;Public;;
00000005;  ;backup;;
00000006;    ;20110323-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000007;    ;20110426-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000008;    ;20110603-JM-F.7z.001;file;
00000009;    ;20110701-JM-F-via-summer_school;;
00000010;      ;20110701-JM-F-yyy.7z.001;file;

Here is the working Perl code:

#filename: perl_regex.pl
#/usr/bin/perl -w
while(<>) {                                                           
  s/^(.*?;.*?)(\w)/$1;$2/;                                            
  print $_;                                                           
}      

It call it from the command line: perl_regex.pl input.txt

Explanation of the Perl-style regex:

s/        # start search-and-replace regexp
  ^       # start at the beginning of this line
  (       # save the matched characters until ')' in $1
    .*?;  # go forward until finding the first semicolon
    .*?   # go forward until finding... (to be continued below)
  )
  (       # save the matched characters until ')' in $2
    \w    # ... the next alphanumeric character.
  )
/         # continue with the replace part
  $1;$2   # write all characters found above, but insert a ; before $2
/         # finish the search-and-replace regexp.

Could anyone tell me, how to get the same result in Python? Especially for the $1 and $2 variables I couldn't find something alike.

Answer 1

The replace instruction for s/pattern/replace/ in python regexes is the re.sub(pattern, replace, string) function, or re.compile(pattern).sub(replace, string). In your case, you will do it so:

_re_pattern = re.compile(r"^(.*?;.*?)(\w)")
result = _re_pattern.sub(r"\1;\2", line)

Note that $1 becomes \\1 . As for perl, you need to iterate over your lines the way you want to do it (open, inputfile, splitlines, ...).

Answer 2

Python regular expression is very similar to Perl's, except:

• In Python there's no regular expression literal. It should be expressed using string. I used r'raw string literal' in the following code.
• Backreferences are expressed as \\1 , \\2 , .. or \\g<1> , \\g<2> , ..
• ...

Use re.sub to replace.

import re
import sys

for line in sys.stdin: # Explicitly iterate standard input line by line
    # `line` contains trailing newline!
    line = re.sub(r'^(.*?;.*?)(\w)', r'\1;\2', line)
    #print(line) # This print trailing newline
    sys.stdout.write(line) # Print the replaced string back.