如何处理Python正则表达式匹配中的多行模式

Question

I have a list of company names to be replaced by the word 'company'. The list across multiple lines.

cmp=re.compile(""" A | B |
                   C | D
               """)
text='A is a great company, so is B'
cmp.sub('company',text)

But it doesn't work. How should I fix this?

Edit:

The above example given didn't consider the whitespace in company names.

company1=re.compile(r"""Berkshire Hathaway|Australia & New Zealand Bank
                  |Wells Fargo|AIG
                  |Ind & Comm Bank of China|BNP Paribas""")
company2=re.compile(r"""Berkshire Hathaway|Australia & New Zealand Bank
                  |Wells Fargo|AIG
                  |Ind & Comm Bank of China|BNP Paribas""",re.VERBOSE)
text='AIG is a great company, so is Berkshire Hathaway'  
company1.sub('cmp',text) 
>>> 'AIG is a great company, so is cmp'
company2.sub('cmp',text) 
>>> 'cmp is a great company, so is Berkshire Hathaway'

Answer 1

You could treat this as an example of a verbose pattern which allows (and ignores) whitespace like line breaks:

import re

cmp = re.compile(r""" A | B |
                   C | D
               """, re.VERBOSE)
text = 'A is a great company, so is B'
print(cmp.sub('company', text))

OUTPUT

company is a great company, so is company

Space is contained in the company names. ... Any idea on how to fix this?

We need to do something like a CGI escape of the space characters that appear inside of names. Here's a regex-based approach that doesn't require decoding of the encoded spaces:

import re

companies = re.compile(re.sub(r"(?<=\S) (?=\S)", r"[ ]", """Berkshire Hathaway|Australia & New Zealand Bank
                  |Wells Fargo|AIG
                  |Ind & Comm Bank of China|BNP Paribas"""), re.VERBOSE)

text = 'AIG is a great company, so is Berkshire Hathaway'

print(companies.sub('cmp', text))

OUTPUT

cmp is a great company, so is cmp