I'm trying to capture all the remaining text in a file after three hyphens at the start of a line (---).
Example:
Anything above this first set of hyphens should not be captured.
---
This is content. It should be captured.
Any sets of three hyphens beyond this point should be ignored.
Everything after the first set of three hyphens should be captured. The closest I've gotten is using this regex [^(---)]+$ which works slightly. It will capture everything after the hyphens, but if the user places any hyphens after that point it instead then captures after the last hyphen the user placed.
I am using this in combination with python to capture text.
If anyone can help me sort out this regex problem I'd appreciate it.
pat = re.compile(r'(?ms)^---(.*)\Z')
The (?ms) adds the MULTILINE and DOTALL flags.
The MULTILINE flag makes ^ match the beginning of lines (not just the beginning of the string.) We need this because the --- occurs at the beginning of a line, but not necessarily the beginning of the string.
The DOTALL flag makes . match any character, including newlines. We need this so that (.*) can match more than one line.
\Z matches the end of the string (as opposed to the end of a line).
For example,
import re
text = '''\
Anything above this first set of hyphens should not be captured.
---
This is content. It should be captured.
Any sets of three hyphens beyond this point should be ignored.
'''
pat = re.compile(r'(?ms)^---(.*)\Z')
print(re.search(pat, text).group(1))
prints
This is content. It should be captured.
Any sets of three hyphens beyond this point should be ignored.
Note that when you define a regex character class with brackets, [...], the stuff inside the brackets are (in general, except for hyphenated ranges like a-z) interpreted as single characters. They are not patterns. So [---] is not different than [-]. In fact, [---] is the range of characters from - to -, inclusive.
The parenthese inside the character class are interpreted as literal parentheses too, not grouping delimiters. So [(---)] is equivalent to [-()], the character class including the hyphen and left and right parentheses.
Thus the character class [^(---)]+ matches any character other than the hyphen or parentheses:
In [23]: re.search('[^(---)]+', 'foo - bar').group()
Out[23]: 'foo '
In [24]: re.search('[^(---)]+', 'foo ( bar').group()
Out[24]: 'foo '
You can see where this is going, and why it does not work for your problem.
Sorry for not directly answering your question, but I wonder if regular expressions are overcomplicating the problem? You could do something like this:
f = open('myfile', 'r')
for i in f:
if i[:3] == "---":
break
text = f.readlines()
f.close()
Or, am I missing something?
I tend to find that regular expressions are difficult enough to maintain that if you don't need their unique capabilities for a given purpose it'll be cleaner and more readable to avoid using them entirely.
s = open(myfile).read().split('\n\n---\n\n', 1)
print s[0] # first part
print s[1] # second part after the dashes
This should work for your example. The second parameter to split specifies how many times to split the string.
Related
I am using a small function to loop over files so that any hyphens - get replaced by en-dashes – (alt + 0150).
The function I use adds some regex flavor to a solution in a related problem (how to replace a character INSIDE the text content of many files automatically?)
def mychanger(fileName):
with open(fileName,'r') as file:
str = file.read()
str = str.decode("utf-8")
str = re.sub(r"[^{]{1,4}(-)","–", str).encode("utf-8")
with open(fileName,'wb') as file:
file.write(str)
I used the regular expression [^{]{1,4}(-) because the search is actually performed on latex regression tables and I only want to replace the hyphens that occur around numbers.
To be clear: I want to replace all hyphens EXCEPT in cases where we have genuine latex code such as \cmidrule(lr){2-4}.
In this case there is a { close (within 3-4 characters max) to the hyphen and to the left of it. Of course, this hyphen should not be changed into an en-dash otherwise the latex code will break.
I think the left part condition of the exclusion is important to write the correct exception in regex. Indeed, in a regression table you can have things like -0.062\sym{***} (that is, a { on the close right of the hyphen) and in that case I do want to replace the hyphen.
A typical line in my table is
variable & -2.061\sym{***}& 4.032\sym{**} & 1.236 \\
& (-2.32) & (-2.02) & (-0.14)
However, my regex does not appear to be correct. For instance, a (-1.2) will be replaced as –1.2, dropping the parenthesis.
What is the problem here?
Thanks!
I can offer the following two step replacement:
str = "-1 Hello \cmidrule(lr){2-4} range 1-5 other stuff a-5"
str = re.sub(r"((?:^|[^{])\d+)-(\d+[^}])","\\1$\\2", str).encode("utf-8")
str = re.sub(r"(^|[^0-9])-(\d+)","\\1$\\2", str).encode("utf-8")
print(str)
The first replacement targets all ranges which are not of the LaTex form {1-9} i.e. are not contained within curly braces. The second replacement targets all numbers prepended with a non number or the start of the string.
Demo
re.sub replaces the entire match. In this case that includes the non-{ character preceding your -. You can wrap that bit in parentheses to create a \1 group and include that in your substitution (you also don't need parentheses around your –):
re.sub(r"([^{]{1,4})-",r"\1–", str)
I have some config file from which I need to extract only some values. For example, I have this:
PART
{
title = Some Title
description = Some description here. // this 2 params are needed
tags = qwe rty // don't need this param
...
}
I need to extract value of certain param, for example description's value. How do I do this in Python3 with regex?
Here is the regex, assuming that the file text is in txt:
import re
m = re.search(r'^\s*description\s*=\s*(.*?)(?=(//)|$)', txt, re.M)
print(m.group(1))
Let me explain.
^ matches at beginning of line.
Then \s* means zero or more spaces (or tabs)
description is your anchor for finding the value part.
After that we expect = sign with optional spaces before or after by denoting \s*=\s*.
Then we capture everything after the = and optional spaces, by denoting (.*?). This expression is captured by parenthesis. Inside the parenthesis we say match anything (the dot) as many times as you can find (the asterisk) in a non greedy manner (the question mark), that is, stop as soon as the following expression is matched.
The following expression is a lookahead expression, starting with (?= which matches the thing right after the (?=.
And that thing is actually two options, separated by the vertical bar |.
The first option, to the left of the bar says // (in parenthesis to make it atomic unit for the vertical bar choice operation), that is, the start of the comment, which, I suppose, you don't want to capture.
The second option is $, meaning the end of the line, which will be reached if there is no comment // on the line.
So we look for everything we can after the first = sign, until either we meet a // pattern, or we meet the end of the line. This is the essence of the (?=(//)|$) part.
We also need the re.M flag, to tell the regex engine that we want ^ and $ match the start and end of lines, respectively. Without the flag they match the start and end of the entire string, which isn't what we want in this case.
The better approach would be to use an established configuration file system. Python has built-in support for INI-like files in the configparser module.
However, if you just desperately need to get the string of text in that file after the description, you could do this:
def get_value_for_key(key, file):
with open(file) as f:
lines = f.readlines()
for line in lines:
line = line.lstrip()
if line.startswith(key + " ="):
return line.split("=", 1)[1].lstrip()
You can use it with a call like: get_value_for_key("description", "myfile.txt"). The method will return None if nothing is found. It is assumed that your file will be formatted where there is a space and the equals sign after the key name, e.g. key = value.
This avoids regular expressions altogether and preserves any whitespace on the right side of the value. (If that's not important to you, you can use strip instead of lstrip.)
Why avoid regular expressions? They're expensive and really not ideal for this scenario. Use simple string matching. This avoids importing a module and simplifies your code. But really I'd say to convert to a supported configuration file format.
This is a pretty simple regex, you just need a positive lookbehind, and optionally something to remove the comments. (do this by appending ?(//)? to the regex)
r"(?<=description = ).*"
Regex101 demo
I'd like find the contents of all Python strings in source code as that code is being typed. I assume the string is contained within a single line, but it might not be closed yet.
Right now I have
for m in re.finditer('''(?P<open>(?:""")|"|(?:''\')|')(?:((?P<closed>.*?)(?P=open))|(?P<unclosed>.*))''', 'as"df'):
i = 3 if m.group(3) else 4
print m.group(i)
But I'd love to have a predictable match group to search on. Something like
re.finditer('''(?P<open>(?:""")|"|(?:''\')|')(.*?)(?P=open)''', line)
is nicer because the contents of the string literal will always be in match group (but this one doesn't match strings that aren't yet closed).
Edit: I'm fine with multiline matches, I just mean to make the problem simpler by excluding them from being in the input.
You can try this:
(?s)('''|"""|'|")((?:(?=([^"'\\]+|\\.|(?!\1)["']))\3)*)\1?
The quote is captured in group 1, a backreference is used at the end to close the string \1.
[^"'\\]+ | \\. | (?!\1)["'] describes allowed content:
[^"'\\]+ # all that is not a quote or a backslash
\\. # an escaped character
(?!\1)["'] # a quote that is not the captured quote
Then, to repeat these elements without risking a catastrophic backtracking, I emulate an atomic group with this trick:(?>subpattern)* => (?:(?=(subpattern))\1)*
Note: If you want to forbid multiline matches, you only need to change the allowed content to
[^"'\r\n\\]+ | \\. | (?!\1)["'] and to remove the (?s) modifier.
[EDIT]
If you want to match a backslash at the end of the string (example: text = r'''abc def ghi\), you need to change the pattern to:
multiline mode:
(?m)('''|"""|'|")((?:(?=([^"'\r\n\\]+|\\(?:.|$)|(?!\1)["']))\3)*)\1?
singleline mode:
(?s)('''|"""|'|")((?:(?=([^"'\\]+|\\(?:.|$)|(?!\1)["']))\3)*)\1?
How about this:
^("""|'''|"|')((?!\\").*?)(?:(?<!\\)\1$|$)
I'm not exactly sure as to the behaviour you would like when it comes down strings that are syntactically wrong, when you have two double quotes before you get to three (at the start and end). But from what I understand this should do the job.
Use the second match group in your code.
I want to write a regex to check if a word ends in anything except s,x,y,z,ch,sh or a vowel, followed by an s. Here's my failed attempt:
re.match(r".*[^ s|x|y|z|ch|sh|a|e|i|o|u]s",s)
What is the correct way to complement a group of characters?
Non-regex solution using str.endswith:
>>> from itertools import product
>>> tup = tuple(''.join(x) for x in product(('s','x','y','z','ch','sh'), 's'))
>>> 'foochf'.endswith(tup)
False
>>> 'foochs'.endswith(tup)
True
[^ s|x|y|z|ch|sh|a|e|i|o|u]
This is an inverted character class. Character classes match single characters, so in your case, it will match any character, except one of these: acehiosuxyz |. Note that it will not respect compound groups like ch and sh and the | are actually interpreted as pipe characters which just appear multiple time in the character class (where duplicates are just ignored).
So this is actually equivalent to the following character class:
[^acehiosuxyz |]
Instead, you will have to use a negative look behind to make sure that a trailing s is not preceded by any of the character sequences:
.*(?<!.[ sxyzaeiou]|ch|sh)s
This one has the problem that it will not be able to match two character words, as, to be able to use look behinds, the look behind needs to have a fixed size. And to include both the single characters and the two-character groups in the look behind, I had to add another character to the single character matches. You can however use two separate look behinds instead:
.*(?<![ sxyzaeiou])(?<!ch|sh)s
As LarsH mentioned in the comments, if you really want to match words that end with this, you should add some kind of boundary at the end of the expression. If you want to match the end of the string/line, you should add a $, and otherwise you should at least add a word boundary \b to make sure that the word actually ends there.
It looks like you need a negative lookbehind here:
import re
rx = r'(?<![sxyzaeiou])(?<!ch|sh)s$'
print re.search(rx, 'bots') # ok
print re.search(rx, 'boxs') # None
Note that re doesn't support variable-width LBs, therefore you need two of them.
How about
re.search("([^sxyzaeiouh]|[^cs]h)s$", s)
Using search() instead of match() means the match doesn't have to begin at the beginning of the string, so we can eliminate the .*.
This is assuming that the end of the word is the end of the string; i.e. we don't have to check for a word boundary.
It also assumes that you don't need to match the "word" hs, even it conforms literally to your rules. If you want to match that as well, you could add another alternative:
re.search("([^sxyzaeiouh]|[^cs]|^h)s$", s)
But again, we're assuming that the beginning of the word is the beginning of the string.
Note that the raw string notation, r"...", is unecessary here (but harmless). It only helps when you have backslashes in the regexp, so that you don't have to escape them in the string notation.
I have a file with the format of
sjaskdjajldlj_abc:
cdf_asjdl_dlsf1:
dfsflks %jdkeajd
sdjfls:
adkfld %dk_.(%sfj)sdaj, %kjdflajfs
afjdfj _ajhfkdjf
zjddjh -15afjkkd
xyz
and I want to find the text in between the string _abc: in the first line and xyz in the last line.
I have already tried print
re.findall(re.escape("*_abc:")+"(*)"+re.escape("xyz"),line)
But I got null.
If I understood the requirement correctly:
a1=re.search(r'_abc(.*)xyz',line,re.DOTALL)
print a1.group(1)
Use re.DOTALL which will enable . to match a newline character as well.
You used re.escape on your pattern when it contains special characters, so there's no way it will work.
>>>>re.escape("*_abc:")
'\\*_abc\\:'
This will match the actual phrase *_abc:, but that's not what you want.
Just take the re.escape calls out and it should work more or less correctly.
It sounds like you have a misunderstanding about what the * symbol means in a regular expression. It doesn't mean "match anything", but rather "repeat the previous thing zero or more times".
To match any string, you need to combine * with ., which matches any single character (almost, more on this later). The pattern .* matches any string of zero or more characters.
So, you could change your pattern to be .*abc(.*)xyz and you'd be most of the way there. However, if the prefix and suffix only exist once in the text the leading .* is unnecessary. You can omit it and just let the regular expression engine handle skipping over any unmatched characters before the abc prefix.
The one remaining issue is that you have multiple lines of text in your source text. I mentioned above that the . patter matches character, but that's not entirely true. By default it won't match a newline. For single-line texts that doesn't matter, but it will cause problems for you here. To change that behavior you can pass the flag re.DOTALL (or its shorter spelling, re.S) as a third argument to re.findall or re.search. That flag tells the regular expression system to allow the . pattern to match any character including newlines.
So, here's how you could turn your current code into a working system:
import re
def find_between(prefix, suffix, text):
pattern = r"{}.*{}".format(re.escape(prefix), re.escape(suffix))
result = re.search(pattern, text, re.DOTALL)
if result:
return result.group()
else:
return None # or perhaps raise an exception instead
I've simplified the pattern a bit, since your comment suggested that you want to get the whole matched text, not just the parts in between the prefix and suffix.