Question

I have a file like this note gap represent new lines.

Hello World )
    ;

Hello World ) ;

Hello World )
;

I have written a small python script to move the semicolon to the end of previous line

with open(path) as f:
    prev_line =''
    for current_line in f:
        matched = re.match('[^(.+)];',current_line,re.MULTILINE)
        if matched is not None:
            current_line = re.sub('[^(.+)];','',current_line,re.MULTILINE)
            prev_line = re.sub(r'^(.+)$',r'\1 ;',prev_line,re.MULTILINE)
        print prev_line.strip()
        prev_line = current_line.strip()

I am getting the expected out put except for the last line where the semicolon is missing

Hello World ) ;





Hello World ) ;



Hello World ) **semicolon is missing here**

Answer 1

You should try using \s*:

>>> import re 
>>> s = '''Hello World )   
...         ;'''
>>> re.sub(r'\s*;', ';', s)
'Hello World );'

\s*; matches any amount of whitespace (including newlines) followed by a semicolon.

Also, re.sub() works on any number of instances of that pattern, so you could just do something like this:

with open(path) as f:
    fixed = re.sub(r'\s*;', ';', f.read())