Parsing Tex using python re library

Question

I want to parse the following part of a .tex file

\section{a}
some random lines with lot 
of special characters
\subsection{aa}
somehthing here too
\section{b}

I want the content within \section{a} and \section{b} inclusive so i tried the following code in python

import re
a="my tex string mentioned above"
b=re.findall(r'\\section{a}.*\\section{b}',a)
print(b)

but i got b=[]. Where I am wrong?

xorsyst · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-13 16:17:59Z

5

You need to use the re.DOTALL flag to make the . match newlines, like this:

b=re.findall(r'\\section{a}.*\\section{b}',a,re.DOTALL)

answered Mar 13, 2014 at 16:17

xorsyst

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2 Comments

Shouldn't the curly braces as metacharacters be escaped with \{?

@halex It seems many parsers treat them as literals, if they don't have a number inside.