# coding=utf8
# the above tag defines encoding for this document and is for Python 2.x compatibility
import re
regex = r"(^.*?)( )"
test_str = ("This is a sentence\n"
"Another sentence shall follow up\n"
"And yet a third sentence\n\n"
"The goal of these sentences is to show \n"
"first spaces that pop up in different line positions\n"
"then we'll use regular expressions to \n"
"select that first space and then replace that space with \n"
"first your insert character and then that space. \n"
" This one starts with a space just to cover that\n"
" useage scenario\n")
subst = "\\1#\\2"
# You can manually specify the number of replacements by changing the 4th argument
result = re.sub(regex, subst, test_str, 0, re.MULTILINE)
if result:
print (result)
# Note: for Python 2.7 compatibility, use ur"" to prefix the regex and u"" to prefix the test string and substitution.
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for Python, please visit: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html