Python: Extracting URLs using regex or other means - python

I’m stumped on a problem. I have a large data frame where two of the columns are like this:
pd.DataFrame([['a', 'https://gofundme.com/ydvmve-surgery-for-jax,https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'], ['b','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1,https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'],['c','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991430/video/1'] ],columns=['ID','URLs'])
What I’m trying to do is leave only the URL including the word “twitter” left in each cell and remove the rest. The pattern is that the URLs I want always include the word “twitter” and ends with “/” + a one-digit number. In the cases where there are two identical URLs in the same cell then only one should remain. Like this:
Test2 = pd.DataFrame([['a', 'https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'],
['b','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'],
['c','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991430/video/1'] ],columns=['ID','URLs'])
Test2
I’m new to Python and after a lot of googling I’ve started to understand that something called regex is the answer but that is as far as I come. One of the postings here at Stackoverflow led me to regex101.com and after playing around this is as far as I’ve come and it doesn't work:
r’^[https]+(:)(//)(.*?)(/)(\d)’
Can anyone tell me how to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.

Regular expressions are certainly handy for such tasks. Refer to this question and online tools such as regex101 to learn more.
Your current pattern is incorrect because:
^ Matches the following pattern at the start of string.
[https]+ This is a character set, meaning it will match h, s, ps, therefore any combination of one or more letters present in the [] brackets, and not just the strings http and https which is what you are after.
(:) You don't need to put this : in a capturing group here.
(//) / Needs to be escaped in regex, \/. No need for capturing group here either.
(.*?) The .*? combo is often misused when a negated character set [^] could be used instead.
(/) As discussed above.
(\d) Matches and captures a digit. The capturing group here is also redundant for your task.
You may use the following expression:
https?:\/\/twitter\.com[^,]+(?<=\/\d$)
https? Matches literal substrings http or https.
:\/\/twitter\.com Matches literal substring ://twitter.com.
[^,]+ Anything that is not a comma, one or more.
(?<=\/\d$) Positive lookbehind. Assert that a / followed by a digit \d is present at the end of the string $.
Regex demo here.
Python demo:
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['a', 'https://gofundme.com/ydvmve-surgery-for-jax,https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'],
['b','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1,https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1'],
['c','https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991430/video/1'] ],columns=['ID','URLs'])
df['URLs'] = df['URLs'].str.findall(r"https?:\/\/twitter\.com[^,]+(?<=\/\d$)").str[0]
print(df)
Prints:
ID URLs
0 a https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1
1 b https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991426/photo/1
2 c https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/890971913173991430/video/1

Related

Python regex conditional, don't match if

Sorry for the somewhat unhelpful title, I'm having a really hard time explaining this issue.
I have a list of unique identifiers that can appear in a number of different ways and I'm trying to use regex to normalize them so I can compare across several databases. Here are some examples of them:
AB1201
AB-1201
AB1201-T
AB-12-01L1
AB1201-TER
AB1201 Transit
I've written a line of code that pulls out all hypens and spaces, and the used this regex:
([a-zA-Z]{2}[\d]{4})(L\d|Transit|T$)?
This works exactly as expected, returning a list looking like this:
AB1201
AB1201
AB1201T
AB1201L1
AB1201
AB1201T
The issue is, I have one identifier that looks like this: AB1201-02. I need this to be raised as an exception, and not included as a match.
Any ideas? I'm happy to provide more clarification if necessary. Thanks!
From Regex101 online tester
You can exclude matching the following hyphen and a digit (?!-\d) using a negative lookahead.
If it should start at the beginning of the string, you could use an anchor ^
Note that you could write [\d] as \d
^([a-zA-Z]{2}\d{4})(?!-\d)(L\d|Transit|T$)?
The pattern will look like
^ Start of string
( Capture group 1
[a-zA-Z]{2}\d{4} Match 2 times a-zA-Z and 4 digits
) Close group
(?!-\d) Negative lookahead, assert what is directly to the right is not - and a digit
(L\d|Transit|T$)? Optional capture group 2
Regex demo
Try this regular expression
^([a-zA-Z]{2}[\d]{4})(?!-\d)(L\d|Transit|T|-[A-Z]{3})?$
I have added the (?!...) Negative Lookahead to avoid matching with the -02.
(?!...) Negative Lookahead: Starting at the current position in the expression, ensures that the given pattern will not match. Does not consume characters.
You can view a demo on this link.

extract string betwen two strings in pandas

I have a text column that looks like:
http://start.blabla.com/landing/fb603?&mkw...
I want to extract "start.blabla.com"
which is always between:
http://
and:
/landing/
namely:
start.blabla.com
I do:
df.col.str.extract('http://*?\/landing')
But it doesn't work.
What am I doing wrong?
Your regex matches http:/, then 0+ / symbols as few as possible and then /landing.
You need to match and capture the characters (The extract method accepts a regular expression with at least one capture group.) after http:// other than /, 1 or more times. It can be done with
http://([^/]+)/landing
^^^^^^^
where [^/]+ is a negated character class that matches 1+ occurrences of characters other than /.
See the regex demo
Just to answer a question you didn't ask, if you wanted to extract several portions of the string into separate columns, you'd do it this way:
df.col.str.extract('http://(?P<Site>.*?)/landing/(?P<RestUrl>.*)')
You'd get something along the lines of:
Site RestUrl
0 start.blabla.com fb603?&mkw...
To understand how this regex (and any other regex for that matter) is constructed I suggest you take a look at the excellent site regex101. I constructed a snippet where you can see the above regex in action here.

How to match 2 out of 3 groups with a non-password-related regular expression in Python?

I've looked at this answer and this answer to try to figure out my problem, but I'm not sure they're directly applicable because a) I don't have a condition that always has to be met, and b) the document is so messy that allowing for any of the three to match would result in a large amount of false positives.
So, with that being said, here is my issue. I have lines of text that I want to match that look like this:
x = "10/04 Some brief description blah blah blah 45.00"
where the spacing between everything is messy. Then, I have some lines of text that I want to match that look like this:
y = "VJ../VI Another stupid brief description 1000.00"
z = "11/13 This is another description LO05.13"
The regular expression I'm currently using is this:
regex = r"^(\d\d\s?[1/]\s?\d\d\s?[1/]\d\d)\s+(\S+(?:\s+\S+)*?)\s+(-?\s?[\d,]+\.\d\d)"
The problem is that in y regex doesn't match because there is no date at the beginning of the string; the OCR process messed up. However, we still know that it's a valid line because it has a description and an amount. regex won't match z either because the amount is not a bunch of digits, but we know it's a transaction because there's a date and a description.
I've considered changing the regex to look like this:
regex = r"^(\d\d\s?[1/]\s?\d\d\s?[1/]\d\d\s+)?(\S+(?:\s+\S+)*?)\s+(-?\s?[\d,]+\.\d\d)?"
But I'm worried that that will just match everything in the document (i.e. "Withdrawals and Debits"). And since the two optional pieces of the line of text are on opposite ends of the more consistent piece of the text, I'm not sure how to implement | like in the solutions to the questions I linked.
Is my best option to just make two different regular expressions, linked with |, like so?
regex = r"^(\d\d\s?[1/]\s?\d\d\s?[1/]\d\d\s+)?(\S+(?:\s+\S+)*?)\s+(-?\s?[\d,]+\.\d\d)|^(\d\d\s?[1/]\s?\d\d\s?[1/]\d\d)\s+(\S+(?:\s+\S+)*?)\s+(-?\s?[\d,]+\.\d\d)?"
Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks
With OCR inputs, it is hard to work out a 100% safe approach. Without the actual output to look at, we can only suggest a general idea on how to deal with each concrete case.
Here, I suggest
r'^(\w+[^\s/]*/\w{2}\b.*?)\s*(\d+\.\d{2})$'
See the regex demo
The pattern is rather a general one:
^ - start of string/line
(\w+[^\s/]*/\w{2}\b.*?) - 1+ alphanumeric symbols or underscore (perhaps, \w+ could be replaced with \w) followed with 0+ non-whitespace and non-/ characters followed with /, then followed with exactly 2 "word" characters followed with a word boundary \b and then as few as possible 0+ characters other than a newline
\s* - 0+ whitespace
(\d+\.\d{2}) - the final float number that can have 1+ digits in the integer part and 2 in the decimal part
$ - end of string/line
Playing around with the limiting quantifier and character classes, you can further fine tune the pattern.
I think the solution suggested in the title is to break the things you are looking for into a series of more focused regex's and then see how many of them you meet.
For example I made:
regex = r"\d\d/\d\d"
regex_2 = r".*\s[\d]+\.\d\d"
Then did:
for i in [x,y,z]:
tests = [re.match(regex, i), re.match(regex_2, i)]
print sum([1 if j else 0 for j in tests])
And got:
2
1
1
I'd need more info before writing the third regex for the description, but I think this is the way forward.

Python Regex Behaviour

I'm trying to parse a text document with data in the following format: 24036 -977. I need to separate the numbers into separate values, and the way I've done that is with the following steps.
values = re.search("(.*?)\s(.*)")
x = values.group(1)
y = values.gropu(2)
This does the job, however I was curious about why using (.*?) in the second group causes the regex to fail? I tested it in the online regex tester(https://regex101.com/r/bM2nK1/1), and adding the ? in causes the second group to return nothing. Now as far as I know .*? means to take any value unlimited times, as few times as possible, and the .* is just the greedy version of that. What I'm confused about is why the non greedy version.*? takes that definition to mean capturing nothing?
Because it means to match the previous token, the *, as few times as possible, which is 0 times. If you would it to extend to the end of the string, add a $, which matches the end of string. If you would like it to match at least one, use + instead of *.
The reason the first group .*? matches 24036 is because you have the \s token after it, so the fewest amount of characters the .*? could match and be followed by a \s is 24036.
#iobender has pointed out the answer to your question.
But I think it's worth mentioning that if the numbers are separated by space, you can just use split:
>>> '24036 -977'.split()
['24036', '-977']
This is simpler, easier to understand and often faster than regex.

Python regex: Matching a URL

I have some confusion regarding the pattern matching in the following expression. I tried to look up online but couldn't find an understandable solution:
imgurUrlPattern = re.compile(r'(http://i.imgur.com/(.*))(\?.*)?')
What exactly are the parentheses doing ? I understood up until the first asterisk , but I can't figure out what is happening after that.
Regular expressions can be represented as graphs to understand there operation. A parallel connection between nodes indicate that it is optional a serial connection indicates taht it is mandatory and a loop indicated repitition over the same node.
(http://i.imgur.com/(.*))(\?.*)?
Debuggex Demo
So this starts with an imgur URL http://i.imgur.com/(.*) (mandatorily) having any characters untill a '?'(optional) is encountered. Following any characters after the '?'. Notice '?' has been escaped of its regular behaviour. The pink highlights indicate the capture groups.
(http://i.imgur.com/(.*))(\?.*)?
The first capturing group (http://i.imgur.com/(.*)) means that the string should start with http://i.imgur.com/ followed by any number of characters (.*) (this is a poor regex, you shouldn't do it this way). (.*) is also the second capturing group.
The third capturing group (\?.*) means that this part of the string must start with ? and then contain any number of any characters, as above.
The last ? means that the last capturing group is optional.
EDIT:
These groups can then be used as:
p = re.compile(r'(http://i.imgur.com/(.*))(\?.*)?')
m = p.match('ab')
m.group(0);
m.group(2);
To improve the regex, you must limit the engine to what characters you need, like:
(http://i.imgur.com/([A-z0-9\-]+))(\?[[^/]+*)?
[A-z0-9\-]+ limit to alphanumeric characters
[^/] exclude /
The (.*) means any character repeated any amount of times, the (\?.*)? matches the query string of a url for example (a imgur search of "cat"):
http://imgur.com/search?q=cat
http://imgur.com/search is matched by the (http://i.imgur.com/(.*)) (the search is specifically matched by the (.*)) section of the regex. The ?q=cat is matched by the (\?.*)? of the regex. In the regex the ? in the end means optional, so it means there might or might not be a query string. There is no query string in the url http://www.imgur.com. The parenthesis are used for grouping. We want to group (http://i.imgur.com/(.*)) as one thing because it matches the url, and there is another group within this that matches the page you are request (this is (.*)). We want to group (\?.*)? because it matches the query string.
Here is a diagram to help you

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