I'm parsing a file and looking in the lines for username-# where the username will change and there can be any number of digits [0-9] after the dash.
I have tried nearly every combination trying to use the variable username in the regular expression.
Am I even close with something like re.compile('%s-\d*'%user)?
Working as it should:
>>> user = 'heinz'
>>> import re
>>> regex = re.compile('%s-\d*'%user)
>>> regex.match('heinz-1')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x2b27a18e3f38>
>>> regex.match('heinz-11')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x2b27a2f7c030>
>>> regex.match('heinz-12345')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x2b27a18e3f38>
>>> regex.match('foo-12345')
re.escape() as @Steven said in his answer. E.g. regex = re.compile('%s-\d*'%re.escape(user)).You could create the string using .format() method of string:
re.compile('{}-\d*'.format(user))
Yes, concatenate the regex yourself, or use string formatting. But don't forget to use re.escape() if your variable could contain characters that have special meaning in regular expressions.
What about:
re.compile(user + '-\d*')
