Regular expression python optimising or idea for text hightlight

Question

I have the following regular expression, and i need some advice about it. I need advice how can i make to highlight the text without changing the word form (uppercase to stay uppercase). I have a list of word that i like to highlight, so i got the following:

  def tagText(self,listSearch,docText):  
    docText=docText.decode('utf-8') 

    for value in listSearch: 
       replace = re.compile(ur""+value+"",  flags=re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE)  
       docText = replace.sub(u"""<b style="color:red">"""+value+"""</b>""", docText,  re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE)

    return docText

You wouldn't have this problem if you used a HTML parser to replace tags. Don't use regex to parse HTML. Tony the pony will destroy us all! — Chinmay Kanchi, Jun 06 '12 at 21:06
possible duplicate of [RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Chinmay Kanchi, Jun 06 '12 at 21:08

georg · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-06T21:10:27.210

You need to use placeholders in your replacement string, instead of the literal value.

def tag_text(self, items, text):
    text = text.decode('utf-8') 
    for item in items: 
        text = re.sub(
            re.escape(item), 
            ur'<b style="color:red">\g<0></b>', 
            text,
            flags=re.IGNORECASE | re.UNICODE)
    return text

print tag_text(None, ["foo", "bar"], "text with Foo and BAR")
# text with <b style="color:red">Foo</b> and <b style="color:red">BAR</b>

(I also cleaned up your function a bit to make it look more "pythonic").

Regular expression python optimising or idea for text hightlight

1 Answers1