regular expressions emoticons

Question

I have data split into fileids. I am trying to go through the data per fileid and search for emoticons :( and :) as defined by the regex. If an emotico

Answer 1

It looks to me like your regex is working, and that m should indeed not be None.

>>> re.search('^(:\(|:\))+$', ':)').group()
':)'
>>> re.search('^(:\(|:\))+$', ':)').group()
':)'
>>> re.search('^(:\(|:\))+$', ':):(').group()
':):('
>>> re.search('^(:\(|:\))+$', ':)?:(').group()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'

However, a few things are questionable to me.

• this will only match strings that are 100% emoticons
• is fileid really what you're searching?