How to split long regular expression rules to multiple lines in Python

Question

Is this actually doable? I have some very long regex pattern rules that are hard to understand because they don\'t fit into the screen at once. Example:

test         


        

Answer 1

Either use string concatenation like in the answer of naeg or use re.VERBOSE/re.X, but be careful this option will ignore whitespace and comments. You have some spaces in your regex, so those would be ignored and you need to either escape them or use \s

So e.g.

test = re.compile("""(?P.+):\d+: # some comment
    \s+warning:\s+Member\s+(?P.+) #another comment
    \s+\((?P%s)\)\ of\ (class|group|namespace)\s+
    (?P.+)\s+is\ not\ documented""" % (self.__MEMBER_TYPES), re.IGNORECASE | re.X)