Develop Reference

Python - Print substrings until matches for all matches

I am looking to find all matches in a string and print all substrings until I match these strings to a new line.
e.g.
"123ABC97edfABCaaabbdd1234ABC0009ui50ABC_1234"
should print:
ABC97edf
ABCaaabbdd1234
ABC0009ui50
ABC_1234
where "ABC" is the pattern match which is recurring.
Is there an efficient way I can do so using findall?
New to Python here, using python version 2.4.3
Edit just an F.Y.I:
What I am trying to do is basically I have a 250+Gb file which has control characters showing start and end of line but these Ctrl Characters (because of issues.. mostly network) are embedded within these lines i.e. in between the start/end indicating control characters.
With that, there is no specific distinction between the start/end control chars and the ones that come in between these messages.
So I am basically removing these control chars, and have I wish to have a complete message per line pertaining to some specific regex.
The regex here is not necessarily ABC or in order for all of these messages.
I have tried using findall and am able to find all the matches, just I did not know how to get the strings following these until i find the next match. (the regex here can be either -ABC=35nga|DEF=64325:dfaf:1234| or **ABC=35632|DEF=61 and many different forms.
And I have to break for each line and for the ones which have multiple lines embededed within a line.

Using re.findall:
See the regex in action on regex101.
s = "123ABC97edfABCaaabbdd1234ABC0009ui50ABC_1234"
re.findall("ABC.*?(?=ABC|$)",s)
which gives a list:
['ABC97edf', 'ABCaaabbdd1234', 'ABC0009ui50', 'ABC_1234']
And if you wanted to print the elements in this list, you could simply do:
for sub in re.findall("ABC.*?(?=ABC|$)",s):
print(sub)
which would output:
ABC97edf
ABCaaabbdd1234
ABC0009ui50
ABC_1234

Identify a dot in an aiml pattern in Python

In a project of mine, I am trying to identify file names in a given sentence. For example, "Could you please open abc.txt", so I need to fetch the keywords "open" in order to know the kind of action that is expected and I also need to identify the file name, for obvious reasons. A simple AIML tag for this is:
<aiml>
<category>
<pattern>* OPEN *</pattern>
<template>open <star index="2"/></template>
<category>
</aiml>
Here, in the template tag, I am just giving an information about the operation to be performed and the file name. My python code on the other hand takes care of performing the required action.
Now the problem is the '.' character. Using that character divides the sentence into 2 parts, (in case of the example I mentioned above, the 2 sentences would be "Could you please open abc" and "txt") which are individually mapped to any of the aiml tags defined. But, in my case I don't want the '.' character to act as a delimiter. Basically, I want to identify file names that may or may not include an extension. Could anyone please help me out with this?
Thanks in advance!

By default AIML allows multi sentence input. This means full stops, exclamation marks and question marks are treated as separators between sentences. For example if you asked:
Good morning. My name is George. How are you today?
this is interpreted as 3 separate inputs. Normally this is a good thing as it means the AIML interpreter can re-use existing patterns for GOOD MORNING, MY NAME IS *, HOW ARE YOU *.
But in your case that's not helping as the full-stop before the extension is causing unwanted splitting. Depending on your AIML interpreter, sentence splitting is done in a pre-processing stage before sending the input to the interpreter. Some AIML interpreters have a configuration file that lets you define the sentence splitting characters, so you may simply be able to remove the full stop from the list of separators.
A better approach may be to pre-process the filenames and replace the full stop with the word DOT, you can then detect this in your pattern * OPEN *
As a final comment, * OPEN * is a very wide ranging pattern, it will also be invoked if someone says WHAT TIME IS THE SHOP OPEN TODAY, or any other input with the word OPEN in it surrounded by text.

How to check if a string matches a certain pattern?

I have a string which is basically a file path of an .mp4 file.
I want to test if the file path is matching one of the following patterns:
/*.mp4 (nothing before the slash, anything after)
*/*.mp4 (anything before and after the slash)
[!A]*.mp4 (anything before the extension, **except** for the character 'A')
What would be the best way to achieve this?
Thanks!
EDIT:
I'm not looking to test if the file ends with .mp4, i'm looking to test if it ends with it and matches each of those 3 scenarios separately.
I tried using the 'endswith' but it's too general and can't "get specific" like what i'm looking for in my examples.

Here they are:
string.endswith('.mp4') and string.startswith('/')
string.endswith('.mp4') and "/" in string
string.endswith('.mp4') and "A" not in string
Or, look at using fnmatch.

Search a delimited string in a file - Python

I have the following read.json file
{:{"JOL":"EuXaqHIbfEDyvph%2BMHPdCOJWMDPD%2BGG2xf0u0mP9Vb4YMFr6v5TJzWlSqq6VL0hXy07VDkWHHcq3At0SKVUrRA7shgTvmKVbjhEazRqHpvs%3D-%1E2D%TL/xs23EWsc40fWD.tr","LAPTOP":"error"}
and python script :
import re
shakes = open("read.json", "r")
needed = open("needed.txt", "w")
for text in shakes:
if re.search('JOL":"(.+?).tr', text):
print >> needed, text,
I want it to find what's between two words (JOL":" and .tr) and then print it. But all it does is printing all the text set in "read.json".

You're calling re.search, but you're not doing anything with the returned match, except to check that there is one. Instead, you're just printing out the original text. So of course you get the whole line.
The solution is simple: just store the result of re.search in a variable, so you can use it. For example:
for text in shakes:
match = re.search('JOL":"(.+?).tr', text)
if match:
print >> needed, match.group(1)
In your example, the match is JOL":"EuXaqHIbfEDyvph%2BMHPdCOJWMDPD%2BGG2xf0u0mP9Vb4YMFr6v5TJzWlSqq6VL0hXy07VDkWHHcq3At0SKVUrRA7shgTvmKVbjhEazRqHpvs%3D-%1E2D%TL/xs23EWsc40fWD.tr, and the first (and only) group in it is EuXaqHIbfEDyvph%2BMHPdCOJWMDPD%2BGG2xf0u0mP9Vb4YMFr6v5TJzWlSqq6VL0hXy07VDkWHHcq3At0SKVUrRA7shgTvmKVbjhEazRqHpvs%3D-%1E2D%TL/xs23EWsc40fWD, which is (I think) what you're looking for.
However, a couple of side notes:
First, . is a special pattern in a regex, so you're actually matching anything up to any character followed by tr, not .tr. For that, escape the . with a \. (And, once you start putting backslashes into a regex, use a raw string literal.) So: r'JOL":"(.+?)\.tr'.
Second, this is making a lot of assumptions about the data that probably aren't warranted. What you really want here is not "everything between JOL":" and .tr", it's "the value associated with key 'JOL' in the JSON object". The only problem is that this isn't quite a JSON object, because of that prefixed :. Hopefully you know where you got the data from, and therefore what format it's actually in. For example, if you know it's actually a sequence of colon-prefixed JSON objects, the right way to parse it is:
d = json.loads(text[1:])
if 'JOL' in d:
print >> needed, d['JOL']
Finally, you don't actually have anything named needed in your code; you opened a file named 'needed.txt', but you called the file object love. If your real code has a similar bug, it's possible that you're overwriting some completely different file over and over, and then looking in needed.txt and seeing nothing changed each time…

If you know that your starting and ending matching strings only appear once, you can ignore that it's JSON. If that's OK, then you can split on the starting characters (JOL":"), take the 2nd element of the split array [1], then split again on the ending characters (.tr) and take the 1st element of the split array [0].
>>> text = '{:{"JOL":"EuXaqHIbfEDyvph%2BMHPdCOJWMDPD%2BGG2xf0u0mP9Vb4YMFr6v5TJzWlSqq6VL0hXy07VDkWHHcq3At0SKVUrRA7shgTvmKVbjhEazRqHpvs%3D-%1E2D%TL/xs23EWsc40fWD.tr","LAPTOP":"error"}'
>>> text.split('JOL":"')[1].split('.tr')[0]
'EuXaqHIbfEDyvph%2BMHPdCOJWMDPD%2BGG2xf0u0mP9Vb4YMFr6v5TJzWlSqq6VL0hXy07VDkWHHcq3At0SKVUrRA7shgTvmKVbjhEazRqHpvs%3D-%1E2D%TL/xs23EWsc40fWD'

Regex pattern to match two datetime formats

I am doing a directory listening and need to get all directory names that follow the pattern: Feb14-2014 and 14022014-sometext. The directory names must not contain dots, so I dont want to match 14022014-sometext.more. Like you can see I want to match just the directories that follow the pattern %b%d-%Y and %d%m%Y-textofanylengthWithoutDots.
For the first case it should be something like [a-zA-Z]{3}\d{2}. I dont know how to parse the rest because my regex skills are poor, sorry. So I hope someone can tell me what the correct patterns look like. Thanks.

I am assuming each directory listing is separated by a new line
([A-Z]\w{2}\d{1,2}\-\d{4}|\d{7,8}\-\w+)$
Will match both cases and will match the text only if it is uninterrupted (by dots or anything else for that matter) until it hits the end of the line.
Some notes:
If you want to match everything except dot you may replace the final \w+ with [^.]+.
You need the multiline modifier /m for this to work, otherwise the $ will match the end of the string only.
I've not added a ^ to the start of the regex, but you may do so if each line contains a single directory
Of course you may expand this regex to include (Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec) instead of [A-Z]\w{2}. I've not done this to keep it readable. I would also suggest you store this in a python array and insert it dynamically into your regex for maintainability sake.
See it in action: http://regex101.com/r/pS6iY9

That's quite easy.
The best one I can make is:
((Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\d\d-\d\d\d\d)|(\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d-\w+)
The first part ((Jan|Feb|Mar|Apr|May|Jun|Jul|Aug|Sep|Oct|Nov|Dec)\d\d-\d\d\d\d) matches the first kind of dates and the second part (\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d-\w+) - the second kind.