Python regex positive look ahead - python

I have the following regex that is supposed to find sequence of words that are ended with a punctuation. The look ahead function assures that after the match there is a space and a capital letter or digit.
pat1 = re.compile(r"\w.+?[?.!](?=\s[A-Z\d])"
What is the function of the following lookahead?
pat2 = re.compile(r"\w.+?[?.!](?=\s+[A-Z\d])"
Is Python 3.2 supporting variable lookahead (\s+)? I do not get any error. Furthermore I cannot see any differences in both patterns. Both seem to work the same regardless the number of blanks that I have. Is there an explanation for the purpose of the \s+ in the look ahead?

I'm not really sure what you are tying to achieve here.
Sequence of words ended by a punctuation can be matched with something like:
re.findall(r'([\w\s]*[\?\!\.;])', s)
the lookahead requires another string to follow?
In any case:
\s requires one and only one space;
\s+ requires at least one space.
And yes, the lookahead accepts the "+" modifier even in python 2.x
The same as before but with a lookahead:
re.findall(r'([\w\s]*[\?\!\.;])(?=\s\w)', s)
or
re.findall(r'([\w\s]*[\?\!\.;])(?=\s+\w)', s)
you can try them all on something like:
s='Stefano ciao. a domani. a presto;'
Depending on your strings, the lookahead might be necessary or not, and might or might not change to have "+" more than one space option.

The difference is that the first lookahead expects exactly one whitespace character before the digit or capital letter while the second one expects at least one whitespace character but as many as possible.
The + is called a quantifier. It means 1 to n as many as possible.
To recap
\s (Exactly one whitespace character allowed. Will fail without it or with more than one.)
\s+ (At least one but maybe more whitespaces allowed.)
Further studying.
I have multiple blanks, the \w.+? continues to match the blanks until the last blank before the capital letter
To answer this comment please consider :
What does \w.+? actually matches?
A single word character [a-zA-Z0-9_] followed by at least one "any" character(except newline) but with the lazy quantifier +?. So in your case, it leaves one space so that the lookahead later matches. Therefore you consume all the blanks except one. This is why you see them at your output.

Related

Regex backreference to match opposite case

Before I begin — it may be worth stating, that: this technically does not have to be solved using a Regex, it's just that I immediately thought of a Regex when I started solving this problem, and I'm interested in knowing whether it's possible to solve using a Regex.
I've spent the last couple hours trying to create a Regex that does the following.
The regex must match a string that is ten characters long, iff the first five characters and last five characters are identical but each individual character is opposite in case.
In other words, if you take the first five characters, invert the case of each individual character, that should match the last five characters of the string.
For example, the regex should match abCDeABcdE, since the first five characters and the last five characters are the same, but each matching character is opposite in case. In other words, flip_case("abCDe") == "ABcdE"
Here are a few more strings that should match:
abcdeABCDE, abcdEABCDe, zYxWvZyXwV.
And here are a few that shouldn't match:
abcdeABCDZ, although the case is opposite, the strings themselves do not match.
abcdeABCDe, is a very close match, but should not match since the e's are not opposite in case.
Here is the first regex I tried, which is obviously wrong since it doesn't account for the case-swap process.
/([a-zA-Z]{5})\1/g
My next though was whether the following is possible in a regex, but I've been reading several Regex tutorials and I can't seem to find it anywhere.
/([A-Z])[\1+32]/g
This new regex (that obviously doesn't work) is supposed to match a single uppercase letter, immediately followed by itself-plus-32-ascii, so, in other words, it should match an uppercase letter followed immediately by its' lowercase counterpart. But, as far as I'm concerned, you cannot "add an ascii value" to backreference in a regex.
And, bonus points to whoever can answer this — in this specific case, the string in question is known to be 10 characters long. Would it be possible to create a regex that matches strings of an arbitrary length?
You want to use the following pattern with the Python regex module:
^(?=(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L}))(?=.*(?!\1)(?i:\1)(?!\2)(?i:\2)(?!\3)(?i:\3)(?!\4)(?i:\4)(?!\5)(?i:\5)$)
See the regex demo
Details
^ - start of string
(?=(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})) - a positive lookahead with a sequence of five capturing groups that capture the first five letters individually
(?=.*(?!\1)(?i:\1)(?!\2)(?i:\2)(?!\3)(?i:\3)(?!\4)(?i:\4)(?!\5)(?i:\5)$) - a ppositive lookahead that make sure that, at the end of the string, there are 5 letters that are the same as the ones captured at the start but are of different case.
In brief, the first (\p{L}) in the first lookahead captures the first a in abcdeABCDE and then, inside the second lookahead, (?!\1)(?i:\1) makes sure the fifth char from the end is the same (with the case insensitive mode on), and (?!\1) negative lookahead make sure this letter is not identical to the one captured.
The re module does not support inline modifier groups, so this expression won't work with that moduue.
Python regex based module demo:
import regex
strs = ['abcdeABCDE', 'abcdEABCDe', 'zYxWvZyXwV', 'abcdeABCDZ', 'abcdeABCDe']
rx = r'^(?=(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L})(\p{L}))(?=.*(?!\1)(?i:\1)(?!\2)(?i:\2)(?!\3)(?i:\3)(?!\4)(?i:\4)(?!\5)(?i:\5)$)'
for s in strs:
print("Testing {}...".format(s))
if regex.search(rx, s):
print("Matched")
Output:
Testing abcdeABCDE...
Matched
Testing abcdEABCDe...
Matched
Testing zYxWvZyXwV...
Matched
Testing abcdeABCDZ...
Testing abcdeABCDe...

Python regex to match words not having dot

I want to accept only those strings having the pattern 'wild.flower', 'pink.flower',...i.e any word preceding '.flower', but the word should not contain dot. For example, "pink.blue.flower" is unacceptable. Can anyone help how to do this in python using regex?
You are looking for "^\w+\.flower$".
Is this sufficient?
^\w+\.\w+$
Here is the regex for you. ^([^\.]*)\.flower$.
Example: https://regex101.com/r/cSL445/1.
Your case of pink.blue.flower is unclear. There are 2 possibilities:
Match only blue (cut off preceding dot and what was before).
Reject this case altogether (you want to match a word preceding .flower
only if it is not preceded with a dot).
In the first case accept other answers.
But if you want the second solution, use: \b(?<!\.)[a-z]+(?=\.flower).
Description:
\b - Start from a word boundary (but it allows the "after a dot" case).
(?<!\.) - Negative lookbehind - exclude the "after a dot" case.
[a-z]+ - Match a sequence of letters.
(?=\.flower) - Positive lookahead for .flower.
I assumed that you have only lower case letters, but if it is not the case,
then add i (case insensitive) option.
Another remark: Other answers include \w, which matches also digits and
_ or even [^\.] - any char other than a dot (including e.g. \n).
Are you happy with that? If you aren't, change to [a-z] (again, maybe
with i option).
To match any character except a newline or a dot you could use a negated character class [^.\r\n]+ and repeat that one or more times and use anchors to assert the start ^ and the end $ of the line.
^[^.\r\n]+\.flower$
Or you could specify in a character class which characters you would allow to match followed by a dot \. and flower.
^[a-z0-9]+\.flower$

regular expression ending

I have ONE string as plain text and want to extract phone numbers of any format from it.
Here is my regex:
r = re.compile(r"(\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{4}|\(\d{3}\)[-\s*]\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{4})")
It extracts the following matches correctly:
617.933.6444
(880)-567-4565
(880) 567-4565
222-333-8888
555 666 4444
9999999999
But how can I avoid getting 7986815059 when I have 798681505951 in the text?
How to make an ending for my regex? (it should not contain letters and digits after and before, exact number count must be 10)
!!!!
Decision
If somebody needs to find US phone numbers in string, use link from the last Wiktor Stribiżew comment.
You need to use word boundaries, but placing them into your pattern is not obvious. It is due to the fact that the second alternative starts with a non-word char, \(. Thus, the first \b must be added at the beginning of the first alternative, and the trailing one at the very end of the pattern:
r'(\b\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4}|\(\d{3}\)[-\s*]\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4})\b'
^^ ^^
See the regex demo
You may also require a non-word char or start of string before (. Then add \B at the second alternative start:
r'(\b\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4}|\B\(\d{3}\)[-\s*]\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4})\b'
^^
See another demo
Also, note that there is no need escaping a . inside a character class, it is already parsed as a literal dot in [.]. And no need using a lazy ?? quantifier, it does not make sense here and a greedy version, ?, will work equally well and will look "cleaner".

Regular expression pattern questions?

I am having a hard time understanding regular expression pattern. Could someone help me regular expression pattern to match all words ending in s. And start with a and end with a (like ana).
How do I write ending?
Word boundaries are given by \b so the following regex matches words ending with ing or s: "\b(\w+?(?:ing|s))\b" where as \b is a word boundary, \w+ is one or more "word character" and (?:ing|s) is an uncaptured group of either ing or s.
As you asked "how to develop a regex":
First: Don't use regex for complex tasks. They are hard to read, write and maintain. For example there is a regex that validates email addresses - but its computer generated and nothing you should use in practice.
Start simple and add edge cases. At the beginning plan what characters you need to use: You said you need words ending with s or ing. So you probably need something to represent a word, endings of words and the literal characters s and ing. What is a word? This might change from case to case, but at least every alphabetical character. Looking up in the python documentation on regexes you can find \w which is [a-zA-Z0-9_], which fits my impression of a word character. There you can also find \b which is a word boundary.
So the "first pseudo code try" is something like \b\w...\w\b which matches a word. We still need to "formalize" ... which we want to have the meaning of "one ore more characters", which directly translates to \b\w+\b. We can now match a word! We still need the s or ing. | translates to or, so how is the following: \b\w+ing|s\b? If you test this, you'll see that it will match confusing things like ingest which should not match our regex. What is happening? As you probably already saw the | can't know "which part it should or", so we need to introduce parenthesis: \b\w+(ing|s)\b. Congratulations, you have now arrived at a working regex!
Why (and how) does this differ from the example I gave first? First I wrote \w+? instead of \w+, the ? turns the + into a non-greedy version. If you know what the difference between greedy and non greedy is, skip this paragraph. Consider the following: AaAAbA and we want to match the things enclosed with big letter A. A naive try: A\w+A, so one or more word characters enclosed with A. This matches AaA, but also AaAAbA, A is still something that can be matched by \w. Without further config the *+? quantifier all try to match as much as possible. Sometimes, like in the A example, you don't want that, you can then use a ? after the quantifier to signal you want a non-greedy version, a version that matches as little as possible.
But in our case this isn't needed, the words are well seperated by whitespaces, which are not part of \w. So in fact you can just let + be greedy and everything will be alright. If you use . (any character) you often need to be careful not to match to much.
The other difference is using (?:s|ing) instead of (s|ing). What does the ?: do here? It changes a capturing group to a non capturing group. Generally you don't want to get "everything" from the regex. Consider the following regex: I want to go to \w+. You are not interested in the whole sentence, but only in the \w+, so you can capture it in a group: I want to go to (\w+). This means that you are interested in this specific piece of information and want to retrieve it later. Sometimes (like when using |) you need to group expressions together, but are not interested in their content, you can then declare it as non capturing. Otherwise you will get the group (s or ing) but not the actual word!
So to summarize:
* start small
* add one case after another
* always test with examples
In fact I just tried re.findall(\b\w+(?:ing|s)\b, "fishing words") and it didn't work. \w+(?:ing|s) works. I've no idea why, maybe someone else can explain that. Regex are an arcane thing, only use them for easy and easy to test tasks.
Generally speaking I'd use \b to match "word boundaries" with \w which matches word components (short cut for [A-Za-z0-9_]). Then you can do an or grouping to match "s" or "ing". Result is:
/\b\w+(s|ing)\b/

Python, regex negative lookbehind behavior

I have a regular experssion that should find up to 10 words in a line. THat is, it should include the word just preceding the line feed but not the words after the line feed. I am using a negative lookbehind with "\n".
a = re.compile(r"((\w)+[\s /]){0,10}(?<!\n)")
r = a.search("THe car is parked in the garage\nBut the sun is shining hot.")
When I execute this regex and call the method r.group(), I am getting back the whole sentence but the last word that contains a period. I was expecting only the complete string preceding the new line. That is, "THe car is parked in the garage\n".
What is the mistake that I am making here with the negative look behind...?
I don't know why you would use negative lookahead. You are saying that you want a maximum of 10 words before a linefeed. The regex below should work. It uses a positive lookahead to ensure that there is a linefeed after the words. Also when searching for words use `b\w+\b` instead of what you were using.
/(\b\w+\b)*(?=.*\\n)/
Python :
result = re.findall(r"(\b\w+\b)*(?=.*\\n)", subject)
Explanation :
# (\b\w+\b)*(?=.*\\n)
#
# Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 1 «(\b\w+\b)*»
# Between zero and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy) «*»
# Note: You repeated the capturing group itself. The group will capture only the last iteration. Put a capturing group around the repeated group to capture all iterations. «*»
# Assert position at a word boundary «\b»
# Match a single character that is a “word character” (letters, digits, etc.) «\w+»
# Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy) «+»
# Assert position at a word boundary «\b»
# Assert that the regex below can be matched, starting at this position (positive lookahead) «(?=.*\\n)»
# Match any single character that is not a line break character «.*»
# Between zero and unlimited times, as many times as possible, giving back as needed (greedy) «*»
# Match the character “\” literally «\\»
# Match the character “n” literally «n»
You may also wish to consider the fact that there could be no \n at your string.
If I read you right, you want to read up to 10 words, or the first newline, whichever comes first:
((?:(?<!\n)\w+\b[\s.]*){0,10})
This uses a negative lookbehind, but just before the word match, so it blocks getting any word after a newline.
This will need some tuning for imperfect input, but it's a start.
For this task there is the anchor $ to find the the end of the string and together with the modifier re.MULTILINE/re.M it will find the end of the line. So you would end up with something like this
(\b\w+\b[.\s /]{0,2}){0,10}$
See it here on Regexr
The \b is a word boundary. I included [.\s /]{0,2} to match a dot followed by a whitespace in my example. If you don't want the dots you need to make this part at least optional like this [\s /]? otherwise it will be missing at the last word and then the \s is matching the \n.
Update/Idea 2
OK, maybe I misunderstood your question with my first solution.
If you just want to not match a newline and continue in the second row, then just don't allow it. The problem is that the newline is matched by the \s in your character class. The \s is a class for whitespace and this includes also the newline characters \r and \n
You already have a space in the class then just replace the \s with \t in case you want to allow tab and then you should be fine without lookbehind. And of course, make the character class optional otherwise the last word will also not be matched.
((\w)+[\t /]?){0,10}
See it here on Regexr
I think you shouldn't be using a lookbehind at all. If you want to match up to ten words not including a newline, try this:
\S+(?:[ \t]+\S+){0,9}
A word is defined here as one or more non-whitespace characters, which includes periods, apostrophes, and other sentence punctuation as well as letters. If you know the text you're matching is regular prose, there's no point limiting yourself to \w+, which isn't really meant to match natural-language words anyway.
After the first word, it repeatedly matches one or more horizontal whitespace characters (space or TAB) followed by another word, for a maximum of ten words. If it encounters a newline before the tenth word, it simply stops matching at that point. There's no need to mention newlines in the regex at all.

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