Regular Experssion

import re

Try to use raw string (r'') when dealing with regular expression to avoid additional backslash to prevent escaping text.

pattern = "^{0}".format(some_str);

marker = re.search(pattern, buffer);

if marker:

prefix = buffer[0:marker.end(1)];

theStr = "<name>Eric</name>"

thePattern = "<name>(.*)</name>"

marker = re.search(thePattern, theStr)

marker.group(0)

'<name>Eric</name>'

marker.group(1)

'Eric'

theStr = "<names><name>A</name><name>B</name></names>"

marker = re.findall(r"<name>(.+?)</name>", theStr)

print marker

['A', 'B']