Replace group in Regex function mode

[lindlind]

I have the following string:

<span class="line">Come here, he says.<span aria-label="11" class="page-normal" id="d5e1496" role="doc-pagebreak" title="11" epub:type="pagebreak"></span></span><br />

If I do a search and replace in Regex mode like this:

Search:

<span([^>]*"pagebreak"> ?)</span>

Replace:

<xxspan\1</xxspan>

The result is:

<span class="line">Come here, he says.<xxspan aria-label="11" class="page-normal" id="d5e1496" role="doc-pagebreak" title="11" epub:type="pagebreak"></xxspan></span><br />

However, if I add the following in a Regex-function:

return regex.sub('<span([^>]*"pagebreak"> ?)</span>', '<xxspan\1</xxspan>', match.group())

The result is this:

<span class="line">Come here, he says.<xxspan
</xxspan></span><br />

What am I doing wrong here?

[thiago.eec]

Python does not understand '\1' as a capturing group. You need to use 'match.groups()[0]' to get the first capturing group.

So, just use it like this:

def replace(match, number, file_name, metadata, dictionaries, data, functions, *args, **kwargs):
    return '<xxspan' + match.groups()[0] + '</xxspan>'

[lindlind]

Thank you, I couldn't make that work either, but tried this, which works!

p = regex.compile('<span([^>]*"pagebreak"> ?)</span>')
return p.sub(r'<xxspan\1</xxspan>', match.group())