Hello, 

I am having a weird problem with regex. I am trying to get the tokens
that match the pattern below, but it is not working only for a specific
case. I do this for many lines of text, and it works, except for the
string '1214578800'.

Any idea of what is happening? Is it a problem of my code or a bug in
regular expressions?

Thanks for any help,

Carlos.



import re
r =
re.compile(",'([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])'[,|)]")
text =
"('25','2','3','2','0','1','0','0/350','30','21','5','','1211641200','1214578800','0','2','1214662622');"
timestamps = r.findall(text)
print timestamps


OUTPUT:
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jul 31 2008, 17:31:22) 
[GCC 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)] on Trabalho15, Standard
>>> ['1211641200', '1214662622']

It's not a Python bug: your regex is invalid. When the regex 
finds '1211641200', it reads >,'1211641200',< includind the last 
comma. So the cursor will be at the apostrophe before 1214578800:
...200','121457...
--------^

You have to change your regex to not check the comma or use a 
non-matching group like (?<=,) and (?=[,)]).

Note: you're using [,|)] which matchs >,<, >|<, and >)<. I guess that 
you wanted [,)].

Sorry, it is really a problem with the comma.

Thanks for helping! :)