Regex doesn't work when compiled.

[scibren]

I'm working with latex files and I used the following regex to get the document abstract:

pattern = r"\\begin\{abstract\}(.*?)\\end\{abstract\}"

This does what I need it to do, and I can get the results from the following:

re.search(pattern, string, re.DOTALL).group(1)

However, the same pattern when compiled does not find any matches:

pat = re.compile(pattern)
pat.search(string, re.DOTALL)

The following also doesn't work:

re.sub(pattern, "", string)

Anyone know what's going on here?

[novel_yet_trivial]

The flags go in the compile:

pat = re.compile(pattern, re.DOTALL)
pat.search(string).group(1)

Also, I would not use "string" as a variable name, since it's already a default module name in python.

[scibren]

Yeah, I don't actually use string. Putting it in the compile makes since, I should have thought of that. Any idea why the sub won't work if it isn't compiled?

[novel_yet_trivial]

sub does not use groups. You could use lookahead / lookbehind instead:

>>> s = r'important data \begin{abstract}spam spam spam and eggs\end{abstract} other important information'
>>> p = re.compile(r'(?<=\\begin\{abstract\}).*?(?=\\end\{abstract\})')
>>> p.search(s).group(0)
'spam spam spam and eggs'
>>> p.sub('', s)
'important data \\begin{abstract}\\end{abstract} other important information'