Determining the unmatched portion of a string using a regex in Python

Question

Suppose I have a string \"a foobar\" and I use \"^a\\s*\" to match \"a \".

Is there a way to easily get \"foobar\" returned? (What was NOT matched)

I want to

Answer 1

Use re.sub:

import re
s = "87 foo 87 bar"
r = re.compile(r"87\s*")
s = r.sub('', s)
print s

Result:

foo bar