Comments on: Usefulness of itertools.cycle & re.sub

By: tim

tim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:58:13 +0000

Heh. If it had taken me more than the 10 minutes it did to do what I described above I’d have looked around for the obviously-must-be-there prior art. ISTR that Sphinx uses Smartypants, so I’d have got there pretty fast. Thanks for the link.

By: tim

tim — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:55:25 +0000

Thanks, Tom. I knew there’d be a good regex solution; I always seem to spend a few minutes poking at more-than-trivial regexes before giving up in disgust at my ignorance and producing solutions like the above. Thanks for the typo report, too. Fixed now.

I suppose I could argue that my solution would scale better to some hypothetical need to cycle round three things but frankly I’d be scrambling for self-justification :)

By: Tom Lynn

Tom Lynn — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:55:13 +0000

There’s also the smartypants module to do this, if you prefer.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/smartypants/

By: Tom Lynn

Tom Lynn — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:51:45 +0000

You’ve got a typo: “&ldqot;”.

More importantly, the magic here is coming from the re module, not itertools. I’d have used::

text = re.sub(r’”([^”]*)”‘, r’&ldquot;\1&rdquot;’, text)