[Python-markdown-discuss] wrapping character ranges in tags

[Eric A. <gi...@gm...>]

Hi there,

I've made a custom inline pattern to wrap Chinese characters in <span  
class="char"></span> tags, using a regex (Chinese characters generally  
fall between \u4e00 and \u9fff).

The below works, but wraps each individual character in its own span  
tags, rather than wrapping consecutive runs of characters in a single  
set of tags:

class SpanPattern(markdown.Pattern):
     def handleMatch(self, m, doc):
         el = doc.createElement('span')
         el.appendChild(doc.createTextNode(m.group(2)))
         el.setAttribute('class','char')
         return el

md.inlinePatterns.insert(-1,SpanPattern(ur'([\u4e00-\u9fff]+)'))

The result is the same whether the + is included in the regex or not;  
is there some other trick I can use to make sure that five characters  
in row, for instance, will get wrapped together in one pair of spans?

TIA,

Eric