Replacing A Regex With A String Of Characters With The Same Length

I want to replace XML tags, with a sequence of repeated characters that has the same number of characters of the tag. For example: 2013-01-21T21:15:00Z

Solution 1:

re.sub accepts a function as replacement:

re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)

If repl is a function, it is called for every non-overlapping occurrence of pattern. The function takes a single match object argument, and returns the replacement string.

Here's an example:

In [1]: import re

In [2]: defrepl(m):
   ...:     return'#' * len(m.group())
   ...: 

In [3]: re.sub(r'<[^<>]*?>', repl,
   ...:     '<o:LastSaved>2013-01-21T21:15:00Z</o:LastSaved>')
Out[3]: '#############2013-01-21T21:15:00Z##############'

The pattern I used may need some polishing, I'm not sure what's the canonical solution to matching XML tags is. But you get the idea.

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