Python regex for blocks of code?

Question

How do I created a regex that can match a start of a line and also all the following lines starting with tab? For example

not keyword ;
    not this line ;
keyword and random text ;
    this line ;
    this line ;
    and this line ;
not keyword ;

I want to be able to match starting from '^keyword' to 'and this line ;'

Thank you.

edit. I'm trying to remove Maya's MEL code for the node I don't need. The actual code looks like this, with multiple lines of setAttr with tab indent.

createNode mentalrayOptions ......... ;
    setAttr .............. ; 

I load the entire text into 1 variable with

with open( 'path/to/file', 'r') as content_file:
    content = content_file.read()

the regex I tried seem to find the starting point correctly but I can't get the end point correctly. It either matches 1 line, not matching anything at all or matches all the way to the end of file.

match = re.search( r'(^createNode mentalrayOptions)(.*\n)(^\t)' ,content, flags=re.DOTALL)

Answer 1

You could use something like this:

^keyword.*(?:\n^\t.*)*

Flags:

• m for mutiline, so ^ works.
• not s so . does not match new-lines.

Explanation:

• ^keyword - Start of the line with keyword
• .* - match until the end of the line
• (?:\\n^\\t.*)* - each of these matches another line that begins with a tab. Note that we hat to match the new-line, so take care if you have other line separators.

Working example: http://www.regex101.com/r/jP8yH0

Naturally, if you are trying to match real blocks of code, this can fail quickly - for example by comments or string literals.