Match a Location tag in Apache httpd.conf with python

Here's the code I've been trying, but it doesn't work.  I'm using Python 2.6.   If someone can please explain why this doesn't work in detail, that would be great.   Thanks in advance:

#!/usr/bin/python
import re


regex=re.compile(r'\s+<Location\s/testing>.*</location>"',re.MULTILINE |re.DOTALL)

for line in open("test.conf"):
    line=line.rstrip()
    match =re.match(regex, line)
    if match:
        print line

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Firstly, the content of the httpd.conf is broken (from the XML point of view). The <Location /> at the line 7 means an empty XML element (a single tag where the closing </Location> is not expected after).  The "/" must be added as some attribute of the element.  The same holds for the line 13.  The line 16 is not paired with any opening <Limit> tag.  The line 17 must be </Location> as XML is case sensitive.

I do recommend to use the standard xml.etree.ElementTree module for parsing XML files instead of the regular expressions.  Try the following as the start point (docs.python.org/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html):

a.py

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse('httpd.conf')
ET.dump(tree)

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Sorry.  Back to the trees :)  I did not noticed that the httpd.conf is not a XML file. Try the following:

b.py

import re

def getLocationLines(fname, loc_id):

    rexLocationOpen = re.compile(r'<Location\s+(\S+)?\s*>')
    rexLocationClose = re.compile(r'</location>')  # should be </Location> with capital L
    f = open(fname)
    status = 0
    for line in f:
        if status == 0:   # waiting for the opening line
            m = rexLocationOpen.search(line)
            if m:         # found?
                if m.group(1) == loc_id:
                    status = 1     # let's generate the content between

        elif status == 1: # generating lines between the tags
            m = rexLocationClose.search(line)
            if m:
                status = 2
            else:
                yield line  # yield the next interesting line

        elif status == 2:   # just pass the rest of the lines
            pass

    f.close()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    for line in getLocationLines('httpd.conf', '/testing'):
        print line.rstrip()

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It prints on my console (Windows):

c:\tmp\___python\unix_admin777\Q_27673761>python b.py
      DAV svn
      SVNPath /home/repos/testing
     </Limit>

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Thank you for the help.  It seems to work, but I also want to match the </Location /testing> </location> tags as well.  Also, even after looking at this code for a while, I still don't understand what it is doing.  Is there any way you can summarize the logic here?  It seems like you have somehow tagged the matched block, but I don't understand how.  


This is what confuses me:

  for line in f:
        if status == 0:   # waiting for the opening line
            m = rexLocationOpen.search(line)
            if m:         # found?
                if m.group(1) == loc_id:
                    status = 1     # let's generate the content between

        elif status == 1: # generating lines between the tags
            m = rexLocationClose.search(line)
            if m:
                status = 2
            else:
                yield line  # yield the next interesting line

        elif status == 2:   # just pass the rest of the lines
            pass

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