How to concisely cascade through multiple regex statements in Python

Question

My dilemma: I\'m passing my function a string that I need to then perform numerous regex manipulations on. The logic is if there\'s a match in the first regex, do one thing

Answer 1

class RegexStore(object):
   _searches = None

   def __init__(self, pat_list):
      # build RegEx searches
      self._searches = [(name,re.compile(pat, re.VERBOSE)) for
                        name,pat in pat_list]

   def match( self, text ):
      match_all = ((x,y.match(text)) for x,y in self._searches)
      try:
         return ifilter(op.itemgetter(1), match_all).next()
      except StopIteration, e:
         # instead of 'name', in first arg, return bad 'text' line
         return (text,None)

You can use this class like so:

rs = RegexStore( (('pat1', r'.*STRING1.*'),
                  ('pat2', r'.*STRING2.*')) )
name,match = rs.match( "MY SAMPLE STRING1" )

if name == 'pat1':
   print 'found pat1'
elif name == 'pat2':
   print 'found pat2'