I have a regular expression to find :ABC:`hello` pattern. This is the code.
format =r".*\:(.*)\:\`(.*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
m = patt.match(l.rstrip())
if m:
...
It works well when the pattern happens once in a line, but with an example ":tagbox:`Verilog` :tagbox:`Multiply` :tagbox:`VHDL`". It finds only the last one.
How can I find all the three patterns?
EDIT
Based on Paul Z's answer, I could get it working with this code
format = r"\:([^:]*)\:\`([^`]*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
for m in patt.finditer(l.rstrip()):
tag, value = m.groups()
print tag, ":::", value
Result
tagbox ::: Verilog
tagbox ::: Multiply
tagbox ::: VHDL
Yeah, dcrosta suggested looking at the re module docs, which is probably a good idea, but I'm betting you actually wanted the finditer function. Try this:
format = r"\:(.*)\:\`(.*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
for m in patt.finditer(l.rstrip()):
tag, value = m.groups()
....
Your current solution always finds the last one because the initial .* eats as much as it can while still leaving a valid match (the last one). Incidentally this is also probably making your program incredibly slower than it needs to be, because .* first tries to eat the entire string, then backs up character by character as the remaining expression tells it "that was too much, go back". Using finditer should be much more performant.
A good place to start is there module docs. In addition to re.match (which searches starting explicitly at the beginning of the string), there is re.findall (finds all non-overlapping occurrences of the pattern), and the methods match and search of compiled RegexObjects, both of which accept start and end positions to limit the portion of the string being considered. See also split, which returns a list of substrings, split by the pattern. Depending on how you want your output, one of these may help.
re.findall or even better regex.findall can do that for you in a single line:
import regex as re #or just import re
s = ":tagbox:`Verilog` :tagbox:`Multiply` :tagbox:`VHDL`"
format = r"\:([^:]*)\:\`([^`]*)\`"
re.findall(format,s)
result is:
[('tagbox', 'Verilog'), ('tagbox', 'Multiply'), ('tagbox', 'VHDL')]
Related
In python, I can easily search for the first occurrence of a regex within a string like this:
import re
re.search("pattern", "target_text")
Now I need to find the last occurrence of the regex in a string, this doesn't seems to be supported by re module.
I can reverse the string to "search for the first occurrence", but I also need to reverse the regex, which is a much harder problem.
I can also iterate to find all occurrences from left to right, and just keep the last one, but that looks awkward.
Is there a smart way to find the rightmost occurrence?
One approach is to prefix the regex with (?s:.*) and force the engine to try matching at the furthest position and gradually backing off:
re.search("(?s:.*)pattern", "target_text")
Do note that the result of this method may differ from re.findall("pattern", "target_text")[-1], since the findall method searches for non-overlapping matches, and not all substrings which can be matched are included in the result.
For example, executing the regex a.a on abaca, findall would return aba as the only match and select it as the last match, while the code above will return aca as the match.
Yet another alternative is to use regex package, which supports REVERSE matching mode.
The result would be more or less the same as the method with (?s:.*) in re package as described above. However, since I haven't tried the package myself, it's not clear how backreference works in REVERSE mode - the pattern might require modification in such cases.
import re
re.search("pattern(?!.*pattern)", "target_text")
or
import re
re.findall("pattern", "target_text")[-1]
You can use these 2 approaches.
If you want positions use
x="abc abc abc"
print [(i.start(),i.end(),i.group()) for i in re.finditer(r"abc",x)][-1]
One approach is to use split. For example if you wanted to get the last group after ':' in this sample string:
mystr = 'dafdsaf:ewrewre:cvdsfad:ewrerae'
':'.join(mystr.split(':')[-1:])
I'm trying to find any text between a '>' character and a new line, so I came up with this regex:
result = re.search(">(.*)\n", text).group(1)
It works perfectly with only one result, such as:
>test1
(something else here)
Where the result, as intended, is
test1
But whenever there's more than one result, it only shows the first one, like in:
>test1
(something else here)
>test2
(something else here)
Which should give something like
test1\ntest2
But instead just shows
test1
What am I missing? Thank you very much in advance.
re.search only returns the first match, as documented:
Scan through string looking for the first location where the regular
expression pattern produces a match, and return a corresponding
MatchObject instance.
To find all the matches, use findall.
Return all non-overlapping matches of pattern in string, as a list of
strings. The string is scanned left-to-right, and matches are returned
in the order found.
Here's an example from the shell:
>>> import re
>>> re.findall(">(.*)\n", ">test1\nxxx>test2\nxxx")
['test1', 'test2']
Edit: I just read your question again and realised that you want "test1\ntest2" as output. Well, just join the list with \n:
>>> "\n".join(re.findall(">(.*)\n", ">test1\nxxx>test2\nxxx"))
'test1\ntest2'
You could try:
y = re.findall(r'((?:(?:.+?)(?:(?=[\n\r][^\n\r])\n|))+)', text)
Which returns ['t1\nt2\nt3'] for 't1\nt2\nt3\n'. If you simply want the string, you can get it by:
s = y[0]
Although it seems much larger than your initial code, it will give you your desired string.
Explanation -
((?:(?:.+?)(?:(?=[\n\r][^\n\r])\n|))+) is the regex as well as the match.
(?:(?:.+?)(?:(?=[\n\r][^\n\r])\n|)) is the non-capturing group that matches any text followed by a newline, and is repeatedly found one-or-more times by the + after it.
(?:.+?) matches the actual words which are then followed by a newline.
(?:(?=[\n\r][^\n\r])\n|) is a non-capturing conditional group which tells the regex that if the matched text is followed by a newline, then it should match it, provided that the newline is not followed by another newline or carriage return
(?=[\n\r][^\n\r]) is a positive look-ahead which ascertains that the text found is followed by a newline or carriage return, and then some non-newline characters, which combined with the \n| after it, tells the regex to match a newline.
Granted, after typing this big mess out, the regex is pretty long and complicated, so you would be better off implementing the answers you understand, rather than this answer, which you may not. However, this seems to be the only one-line answer to get the exact output you desire.
first time posting, I've lurked for a little while, really excited about the helpful community here.
So, working with "Automate the boring stuff" by Al Sweigart
Doing an exercise that requires I build a regex that finds numbers in standard number format. Three digit, comma, three digits, comma, etc...
So hopefully will match 1,234 and 23,322 and 1,234,567 and 12 but not 1,23,1 or ,,1111, or anything else silly.
I have the following.
import re
testStr = '1,234,343'
matches = []
numComma = re.compile(r'^(\d{1,3})*(,\d{3})*$')
for group in numComma.findall(str(testStr)):
Num = group
print(str(Num) + '-') #Printing here to test each loop
matches.append(str(Num[0]))
#if len(matches) > 0:
# print(''.join(matches))
Which outputs this....
('1', ',343')-
I'm not sure why the middle ",234" is being skipped over. Something wrong with the regex, I'm sure. Just can't seem to wrap my head around this one.
Any help or explanation would be appreciated.
FOLLOW UP EDIT. So after following all your advice that I could assimilate, I got it to work perfectly for several inputs.
import re
testStr = '1,234,343'
numComma = re.compile(r'^(?:\d{1,3})(?:,\d{3})*$')
Num = numComma.findall(testStr)
print(Num)
gives me....
['1,234,343']
Great! BUT! What about when I change the string input to something like
'1,234,343 and 12,345'
Same code returns....
[]
Grrr... lol, this is fun, I must admit.
So the purpose of the exercise is to be able to eventually scan a block of text and pick out all the numbers in this format. Any insight? I thought this would add an additional tuple, not return an empty one...
FOLLOW UP EDIT:
So, a day later(Been busy with 3 daughters and Honey-do lists), I've finally been able to sit down and examine all the help I've received. Here's what I've come up with, and it appears to work flawlessly. Included comments for my own personal understanding. Thanks again for everything, Blckknght, Saleem, mhawke, and BHustus.
My final code:
import re
testStr = '12,454 So hopefully will match 1,234 and 23,322 and 1,234,567 and 12 but not 1,23,1 or ,,1111, or anything else silly.'
numComma = re.compile(r'''
(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\s)) # Looks behind the Match for start of line and whitespace
((?:\d{1,3}) # Matches on groups of 1-3 numbers.
(?:,\d{3})*) # Matches on groups of 3 numbers preceded by a comma
(?=\s|$)''', re.VERBOSE) # Looks ahead of match for end of line and whitespace
Num = numComma.findall(testStr)
print(Num)
Which returns:
['12,454', '1,234', '23,322', '1,234,567', '12']
Thanks again! I have had such a positive first posting experience here, amazing. =)
The issue is due to the fact you're using a repeated capturing group, (,\d{3})* in your pattern. Python's regex engine will match that against both the thousands and ones groups of your number, but only the last repetition will be captured.
I suspect you want to use non-capturing groups instead. Add ?: to the start of each set of parentheses (I'd also recommend, on general principle, to use a raw string, though you don't have escaping issues in your current pattern):
numComma = re.compile(r'^(?:\d{1,3})(?:,\d{3})*$')
Since there are no groups being captured, re.findall will return the whole matched text, which I think is what you wanted. You can also use re.find or re.search and call the group() method on the returned match object to get the whole matched text.
The problem is:
A regex match will return a tuple item for each group. However, it is important to distinguish a group from a capture. Since you only have two parenthese-delimited groups, the matches will always be tuples of two: the first group, and the second. But the second group matches twice.
1: first group, captured
,234: second group, captured
,343: also second group, which means it overwrites ,234.
Unfortunately, it seems that vanilla Python does not have a way to access any captures of a group other than the last one in a manner similar to .NET's regex implementation. However, if you are only interested in getting the specific number, your best bet would be to use re.search(number). If it returns a non-None value, then the input string is a valid number. Otherwise, it is not.
Additionally: A test on your regex. Note that, as Paul Hankin stated, test cases 6 and 7 match even though they shouldn't, due to the first * following the first capturing group, which will make the initial group match any number of times. Otherwise, your regex is correct. Fixed version.
RESPONSE TO EDIT:
The reason now that your regex returns an empty set on ' and ' is because of the ^ and $ anchors in your regex. The ^ anchor, at the start of the regex, says 'this point needs to be at the start of a string'. The $ is its counterpart, saying 'This needs to be at the end of the string'. This is good if you want your entire string from start to end to match the pattern, but if you want to pick out multiple numbers, you should do away with them.
HOWEVER!
If you leave the regex in its current form sans anchors, it will now match the individual elements of 1,23,45 as separate numbers. So for this we need to add a zero-width positive lookahead assertion and say, 'make sure that after this number is either whitespace or the end of a line'. You can see the change here. The tail end, (?=\s|$), is our lookahead assertion: it doesn't capture anything, but just makes sure criteria or met, in this case whitespace (\s) or (|) the end of a line ($).
BUT: In a similar vein, the previous regex would have matched 2 onward in "1234,567", giving us the number "234,567", which would be bad. So we use a lookbehind assertion similar to our lookahead at the end: (?<!^|\s), only match if at the beginning of the string or there is whitespace before the number. This version can be found here, and should soundly satisfy any non-decimal number related needs.
Try:
import re
p = re.compile(ur'(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\s))((?:\d{1,3})(?:,\d{3})*)(?=\s|$)', re.DOTALL)
test_str = """1,234 and 23,322 and 1,234,567 1,234,567,891 200 and 12 but
not 1,23,1 or ,,1111, or anything else silly"""
for m in re.findall(p, test_str):
print m
and it's output will be
1,234
23,322
1,234,567
1,234,567,891
200
12
You can see demo here
This regex, would match any valid number, and would never match an invalid number:
(?<=^|\s)(?:(?:0|[1-9][0-9]{0,2}(?:,[0-9]{3})*))(?=\s|$)
https://regex101.com/r/dA4yB1/1
EDIT: remove original example because it provoked ancillary answers. also fixed the title.
The question is why the presence of the "$" in the regular expression effects the greedyness of the expression:
Here is a simpler example:
>>> import re
>>> str = "baaaaaaaa"
>>> m = re.search(r"a+$", str)
>>> m.group()
'aaaaaaaa'
>>> m = re.search(r"a+?$", str)
>>> m.group()
'aaaaaaaa'
The "?" seems to be doing nothing. Note the when the "$" is removed, however, then the "?" is respected:
>>> m = re.search(r"a+?", str)
>>> m.group()
'a'
EDIT:
In other words, "a+?$" is matching ALL of the a's instead of just the last one, this is not what I expected. Here is the description of the regex "+?" from the python docs:
"Adding '?' after the qualifier makes it perform the match in non-greedy or minimal fashion; as few characters as possible will be matched."
This does not seem to be the case in this example: the string "a" matches the regex "a+?$", so why isn't the match for the same regex on the string "baaaaaaa" just a single a (the rightmost one)?
Matches are "ordered" by "left-most, then longest"; however "longest" is the term used before non-greedy was allowed, and instead means something like "preferred number of repetitions for each atom". Being left-most is more important than the number of repetitions. Thus, "a+?$" will not match the last A in "baaaaa" because matching at the first A starts earlier in the string.
(Answer changed after OP clarification in comments. See history for previous text.)
The non-greedy modifier only affects where the match stops, never where it starts. If you want to start the match as late as possible, you will have to add .+? to the beginning of your pattern.
Without the $, your pattern is allowed to be less greedy and stop sooner, because it doesn't have to match to the end of the string.
EDIT:
More details... In this case:
re.search(r"a+?$", "baaaaaaaa")
the regex engine will ignore everything up until the first 'a', because that's how re.search works. It will match the first a, and would "want" to return a match, except it doesn't match the pattern yet because it must reach a match for the $. So it just keeps eating the a's one at a time and checking for $. If it were greedy, it wouldn't check for the $ after each a, but only after it couldn't match any more a's.
But in this case:
re.search(r"a+?", "baaaaaaaa")
the regex engine will check if it has a complete match after eating the first match (because it's non-greedy) and succeed because there is no $ in this case.
The presence of the $ in the regular expression does not affect the greediness of the expression. It merely adds another condition which must be met for the overall match to succeed.
Both a+ and a+? are required to consume the first a they find. If that a is followed by more a's, a+ goes ahead and consumes them too, while a+? is content with just the one. If there were anything more to the regex, a+ would be willing to settle for fewer a's, and a+? would consume more, if that's what it took to achieve a match.
With a+$ and a+?$, you've added another condition: match at least one a followed by the end of the string. a+ still consumes all of the a's initially, then it hands off to the anchor ($). That succeeds on the first try, so a+ is not required to give back any of its a's.
On the other hand, a+? initially consumes just the one a before handing off to $. That fails, so control is returned to a+?, which consumes another a and hands off again. And so it goes, until a+? consumes the last a and $ finally succeeds. So yes, a+?$ does match the same number of a's as a+$, but it does so reluctantly, not greedily.
As for the leftmost-longest rule that was mentioned elsewhere, that never did apply to Perl-derived regex flavors like Python's. Even without reluctant quantifiers, they could always return a less-then-maximal match thanks to ordered alternation. I think Jan's got the right idea: Perl-derived (or regex-directed) flavors should be called eager, not greedy.
I believe the leftmost-longest rule only applies to POSIX NFA regexes, which use NFA engines under under the hood, but are required to return the same results a DFA (text-directed) regex would.
Answer to original question:
Why does the first search() span
multiple "/"s rather than taking the
shortest match?
A non-greedy subpattern will take the shortest match consistent with the whole pattern succeeding. In your example, the last subpattern is $, so the previous ones need to stretch out to the end of the string.
Answer to revised question:
A non-greedy subpattern will take the shortest match consistent with the whole pattern succeeding.
Another way of looking at it: A non-greedy subpattern will initially match the shortest possible match. However if this causes the whole pattern to fail, it will be retried with an extra character. This process continues until the subpattern fails (causing the whole pattern to fail) or the whole pattern matches.
There are two issues going on, here. You used group() without specifying a group, and I can tell you are getting confused between the behavior of regular expressions with an explicitly parenthesized group and without a parenthesized group. This behavior without parentheses that you are observing is just a shortcut that Python provides, and you need to read the documentation on group() to understand it fully.
>>> import re
>>> string = "baaa"
>>>
>>> # Here you're searching for one or more `a`s until the end of the line.
>>> pattern = re.search(r"a+$", string)
>>> pattern.group()
'aaa'
>>>
>>> # This means the same thing as above, since the presence of the `$`
>>> # cancels out any meaning that the `?` might have.
>>> pattern = re.search(r"a+?$", string)
>>> pattern.group()
'aaa'
>>>
>>> # Here you remove the `$`, so it matches the least amount of `a` it can.
>>> pattern = re.search(r"a+?", string)
>>> pattern.group()
'a'
Bottom line is that the string a+? matches one a, period. However, a+?$ matches a's until the end of the line. Note that without explicit grouping, you'll have a hard time getting the ? to mean anything at all, ever. In general, it's better to be explicit about what you're grouping with parentheses, anyway. Let me give you an example with explicit groups.
>>> # This is close to the example pattern with `a+?$` and therefore `a+$`.
>>> # It matches `a`s until the end of the line. Again the `?` can't do anything.
>>> pattern = re.search(r"(a+?)$", string)
>>> pattern.group(1)
'aaa'
>>>
>>> # In order to get the `?` to work, you need something else in your pattern
>>> # and outside your group that can be matched that will allow the selection
>>> # of `a`s to be lazy. # In this case, the `.*` is greedy and will gobble up
>>> # everything that the lazy `a+?` doesn't want to.
>>> pattern = re.search(r"(a+?).*$", string)
>>> pattern.group(1)
'a'
Edit: Removed text related to old versions of the question.
Unless your question isn't including some important information, you don't need, and shouldn't use, regex for this task.
>>> import os
>>> p = "/we/shant/see/this/butshouldseethis"
>>> os.path.basename(p)
butshouldseethis
I have a couple email addresses, 'support#company.com' and '1234567#tickets.company.com'.
In perl, I could take the To: line of a raw email and find either of the above addresses with
/\w+#(tickets\.)?company\.com/i
In python, I simply wrote the above regex as'\w+#(tickets\.)?company\.com' expecting the same result. However, support#company.com isn't found at all and a findall on the second returns a list containing only 'tickets.'. So clearly the '(tickets\.)?' is the problem area, but what exactly is the difference in regular expression rules between Perl and Python that I'm missing?
The documentation for re.findall:
findall(pattern, string, flags=0)
Return a list of all non-overlapping matches in the string.
If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a
list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern
has more than one group.
Empty matches are included in the result.
Since (tickets\.) is a group, findall returns that instead of the whole match. If you want the whole match, put a group around the whole pattern and/or use non-grouping matches, i.e.
r'(\w+#(tickets\.)?company\.com)'
r'\w+#(?:tickets\.)?company\.com'
Note that you'll have to pick out the first element of each tuple returned by findall in the first case.
I think the problem is in your expectations of extracted values. Try using this in your current Python code:
'(\w+#(?:tickets\.)?company\.com)'
Two problems jump out at me:
You need to use a raw string to avoid having to escape "\"
You need to escape "."
So try:
r'\w+#(tickets\.)?company\.com'
EDIT
Sample output:
>>> import re
>>> exp = re.compile(r'\w+#(tickets\.)?company\.com')
>>> bool(exp.match("s#company.com"))
True
>>> bool(exp.match("1234567#tickets.company.com"))
True
There isn't a difference in the regexes, but there is a difference in what you are looking for. Your regex is capturing only "tickets." if it exists in both regexes. You probably want something like this
#!/usr/bin/python
import re
regex = re.compile("(\w+#(?:tickets\.)?company\.com)");
a = [
"foo#company.com",
"foo#tickets.company.com",
"foo#ticketsacompany.com",
"foo#compant.org"
];
for string in a:
print regex.findall(string)