Python regex re.sub : something

Question

I have a program like this :

import re

x='aaaaaaaa;aa;aaa;aaa;aaaaaaaaaa;'
x=re.sub(';','.',x, re.IGNORECASE)

print x

But the output is like this:

aaaaaaaa.aa.aaa;aaa;aaaaaaaaaa;

There are still some ; not replaced by a . , why ?

Using Python 2.6

Answer 1

Update - In Python 2.6 you can just do this:

>>> re.sub('(?i);','.',x)
'aaaaaaaa.aa.aaa.aaa.aaaaaaaaaa.'

For Python 2.7+ and 3.0+

Do this instead, the third parameter is actually the count(number of replacements to make) and re.IGNORECASE is simply an integer so it is using that as the count.

>>> re.sub(';','.',x, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
'aaaaaaaa.aa.aaa.aaa.aaaaaaaaaa.'

>>> re.IGNORECASE
2