compare regular expression with regular expression

Question

I have a list of strings with a set size, for instance:

1. ATTG
2. ATGC
3. ATNG
4. ATTN

A, T, G and C are always the same, but N can take on every value. So i wanted to change them to regular expression:

1. ATTG
2. ATGC
3. AT[ATCG]G
4. ATT[ATCG]

And now i want to be able to say: value 1,3 and 4 are equal, and value 2 is unique. But how can you compare two regular expression to see if they are equal?

i am currently programming in python 2.7, but if other languages are able to give the me results, i am willing to switch or run the code from command line.

Answer 1

Why not do it yourself, since you are not actually using regular expression. I guess you just only want to compare two sequences.

def match(a,b):
    if a==b or a=='N' or b=='N':
        return True
    else:
        return False

def compare(str1,str2):
    if len(str1)!=len(str2):
        return False
    for i in range(len(str1)):
        if not match(str1[i],str2[i]):
            return False
    return True

print compare('ATTG','ATNG')
# True
print compare('ATTN','ATGC')
# False