Tvtropes despoiler script

#!/usr/bin/python3
import re
re.purge()

#purge spoiler tags from Tvtropes document

#There's probably a simpler way to do this that doesn't require 3 separate loops,
#but I'm not very good at regular expressions
#so this was the best I could come up with that didn't have undesirable side effects.


#corner case: this will fail if the original document contains 3 consecutive double-quote (") characters.
article = """simply paste
the article you want to despoiler
into this multi-line
triple-quoted string"""

#corner case: this will fail if this obscure Unicode emoji character is actually in the original document
pl1 = "🐰"
theList = []

# this loop evacuates all bracketed expressions besides spoilertags
# into a list of strings, replacing them with our adorable placeholder character
while re.search(r'((\[\[)(?!spoiler:))(.+?\]\])',article) != None:
    tmp1 = re.search(r'((\[\[)(?!spoiler:))(.+?\]\])',article)
    tmp2 = tmp1.group()
    theList.append(tmp2)
    article = re.sub(r'((\[\[)(?!spoiler:))(.+?\]\])',pl1,article,count=1)

# remove spoiler tags from the document
while re.search(r'\[\[spoiler:.+\]\]',article) != None:
    tmp1 = re.search(r'\[\[spoiler:.+\]\]',article)
    tmp2 = tmp1.group()
    tmp3 = re.sub(r'^\[\[spoiler:',"",tmp2,count=1)
    tmp4 = re.sub(r'\]\]$',"",tmp3,count=1)
    article = re.sub(r'\[\[spoiler:.+\]\]',tmp4,article,count=1)

# pull our other bracketed expressions out of the list and re-insert them
theList.reverse()
while re.search(pl1,article) != None:
    article = re.sub(pl1,theList.pop(),article,count=1)


#Not bothering to write to a file "properly". You can just capture the standard output if you need to.
#e.g. on a linux/unix shell you would do 'python3 purge_spoilers.py >> output.txt'
print(article)