regular expression with matching empty string

Question

I am working on a django project to modify database options in the file settings.py.I want to use regular expression to do it. the options just like : 'PASSWORD':'123456', so I have write a function,the code is following:

    def config_item(self,data,item,value):
        rStr = "'"+item+"':(\s)?'\w*'"
        src = "'"+item+"': '"+value+"'"
        res = re.sub(rStr,src,data)
        return res

So I can call like this to modify password to '000000',

data = config_item(data,'PASSWORD','0000')

But when the source password is blank or dest password is blank ,it does not work.That is ,it does not match 'PASSWORD':'', Are there some wrong with the regular expression. How do I write it rightly.

Answer 1

Maybe try using '[^']*' instead of '\w*'

I think \w is a bit more strict.