From: egrasso <egrasso.rb@...2.net>
Date: 2008-07-14T23:05:41+09:00
Subject: regexp with gaps

Hi, I need to find the position of some substrings inside of a long
string. For this I'm using a loop that uses str.index(pattern,
(last_found_position+1)) so I find all positions where the pattern
matches. The pattern is a string of 20 chars, different each time I
run the script. That worked perfect. The problem is that now I need to
find all positions where the pattern matches 12 or more chars.
For example: For the pattern "aaaaaa", find substrings "aaaaaa",
"aaabaa", "baaaaa", "ababaa", etc

First I thought that I could create all possible patterns (with \w)
and check them, but I realized that there would be a lot of different
patterns to check (over a few hundreds I think).
Is there any way to do this without the need of checking a lot of
patterns?
thanks