Question

I don’t know much about regexes and am trying to learn them. I am using Python and need to use re.compile to make a regex that matches any string that starts with a variable string. The string is variable url. Currently I have re.compile('%s*'%url), but it does not seem to work. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use re.escape(url):

In [15]: import re

In [16]: url = 'http://stackoverflow.com'

In [17]: pat = re.compile(re.escape(url))

In [18]: pat.match('http://stackoverflow.com')
Out[18]: <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x8fd4c28>

In [19]: pat.match('http://foo.com') is None
Out [19]: True