We Keep Coding

Python regex to match after the text and the dot [duplicate]

I am using Python and would like to match all the words after test till a period (full-stop) or space is encountered.
text = "test : match this."
At the moment, I am using :
import re
re.match('(?<=test :).*',text)
The above code doesn't match anything. I need match this as my output.

Everything after test, including test
test.*
Everything after test, without test
(?<=test).*
Example here on regexr.com

You need to use re.search since re.match tries to match from the beging of the string. To match until a space or period is encountered.
re.search(r'(?<=test :)[^.\s]*',text)
To match all the chars until a period is encountered,
re.search(r'(?<=test :)[^.]*',text)

In a general case, as the title mentions, you may capture with (.*) pattern any 0 or more chars other than newline after any pattern(s) you want:
import re
p = re.compile(r'test\s*:\s*(.*)')
s = "test : match this."
m = p.search(s) # Run a regex search anywhere inside a string
if m: # If there is a match
print(m.group(1)) # Print Group 1 value
If you want . to match across multiple lines, compile the regex with re.DOTALL or re.S flag (or add (?s) before the pattern):
p = re.compile(r'test\s*:\s*(.*)', re.DOTALL)
p = re.compile(r'(?s)test\s*:\s*(.*)')
However, it will retrun match this.. See also a regex demo.
You can add \. pattern after (.*) to make the regex engine stop before the last . on that line:
test\s*:\s*(.*)\.
Watch out for re.match() since it will only look for a match at the beginning of the string (Avinash aleady pointed that out, but it is a very important note!)
See the regex demo and a sample Python code snippet:
import re
p = re.compile(r'test\s*:\s*(.*)\.')
s = "test : match this."
m = p.search(s) # Run a regex search anywhere inside a string
if m: # If there is a match
print(m.group(1)) # Print Group 1 value
If you want to make sure test is matched as a whole word, add \b before it (do not remove the r prefix from the string literal, or '\b' will match a BACKSPACE char!) - r'\btest\s*:\s*(.*)\.'.

I don't see why you want to use regex if you're just getting a subset from a string.
This works the same way:
if line.startswith('test:'):
print(line[5:line.find('.')])
example:
>>> line = "test: match this."
>>> print(line[5:line.find('.')])
match this
Regex is slow, it is awkward to design, and difficult to debug. There are definitely occassions to use it, but if you just want to extract the text between test: and ., then I don't think is one of those occasions.
See: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/113237/when-you-should-not-use-regular-expressions
For more flexibility (for example if you are looping through a list of strings you want to find at the beginning of a string and then index out) replace 5 (the length of 'test:') in the index with len(str_you_looked_for).

Match everything except a pattern and replace matched with string

I want to use python in order to manipulate a string I have.
Basically, I want to prepend"\x" before every hex byte except the bytes that already have "\x" prepended to them.
My original string looks like this:
mystr = r"30336237613131\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x146F6D6D616E64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F52656C6174\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50656D31\x90\x00"
And I want to create the following string from it:
mystr = r"\x30\x33\x62\x37\x61\x31\x31\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x14\x6F\x6D\x6D\x61\x6E\x64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F\x52\x65\x6C\x61\x74\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50\x65\x6D\x31\x90\x00"
I thought of using regular expressions to match everything except /\x../g and replace every match with "\x". Sadly, I struggled with it a lot without any success. Moreover, I'm not sure that using regex is the best approach to solve such case.

Regex: (?:\\x)?([0-9A-Z]{2}) Substitution: \\x$1
Details:
(?:) Non-capturing group
? Matches between zero and one time, match string \x if it exists.
() Capturing group
[] Match a single character present in the list 0-9 and A-Z
{n} Matches exactly n times
\\x String \x
$1 Group 1.
Python code:
import re
text = R'30336237613131\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x146F6D6D616E64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F52656C6174\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50656D31\x90\x00'
text = re.sub(R'(?:\\x)?([0-9A-Z]{2})', R'\\x\1', text)
print(text)
Output:
\x30\x33\x62\x37\x61\x31\x31\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x14\x6F\x6D\x6D\x61\x6E\x64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F\x52\x65\x6C\x61\x74\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50\x65\x6D\x31\x90\x00
Code demo

You don't need regex for this. You can use simple string manipulation. First remove all of the "\x" from your string. Then add add it back at every 2 characters.
replaced = mystr.replace(r"\x", "")
newstr = "".join([r"\x" + replaced[i*2:(i+1)*2] for i in range(len(replaced)/2)])
Output:
>>> print(newstr)
\x30\x33\x62\x37\x61\x31\x31\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x14\x6F\x6D\x6D\x61\x6E\x64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F\x52\x65\x6C\x61\x74\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50\x65\x6D\x31\x90\x00

You can get a list with your values to manipulate as you wish, with an even simpler re pattern
mystr = r"30336237613131\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x146F6D6D616E64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F52656C6174\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50656D31\x90\x00"
import re
pat = r'([a-fA-F0-9]{2})'
match = re.findall(pat, mystr)
if match:
print('\n\nNew string:')
print('\\x' + '\\x'.join(match))
#for elem in match: # match gives you a list of strings with the hex values
# print('\\x{}'.format(elem), end='')
print('\n\nOriginal string:')
print(mystr)

This can be done without replacing existing \x by using a combination of positive lookbehinds and negative lookaheads.
(?!(?<=\\x)|(?<=\\x[a-f\d]))([a-f\d]{2})
Usage
See code in use here
import re
regex = r"(?!(?<=\\x)|(?<=\\x[a-f\d]))([a-f\d]{2})"
test_str = r"30336237613131\x90\x01\x0A\x90\x02\x146F6D6D616E64\x90\x01\x06\x90\x02\x0F52656C6174\x90\x01\x02\x90\x02\x50656D31\x90\x00"
subst = r"\\x$1"
result = re.sub(regex, subst, test_str, 0, re.IGNORECASE)
if result:
print (result)
Explanation
(?!(?<=\\x)|(?<=\\x[a-f\d])) Negative lookahead ensuring either of the following doesn't match.
(?<=\\x) Positive lookbehind ensuring what precedes is \x.
(?<=\\x[a-f\d]) Positive lookbehind ensuring what precedes is \x followed by a hexidecimal digit.
([a-f\d]{2}) Capture any two hexidecimal digits into capture group 1.

How to remove substrings marked with special characters from a string?

I have a string in Python:
Tt = "This is a <\"string\">string, It should be <\"changed\">changed to <\"a\">a nummber."
print Tt
'This is a <"string">string, It should be <"changed">changed to <"a">a nummber.'
You see the some words repeat in this part <\" \">.
My question is, how to delete those repeated parts (delimited with the named characters)?
The result should be like:
'This is a string, It should be changed to a nummber.'

Use regular expressions:
import re
Tt = re.sub('<\".*?\">', '', Tt)
Note the ? after *. It makes the expression non-greedy,
so it tries to match so few symbols between <\" and \"> as possible.
The Solution of James will work only in cases when the delimiting substrings
consist only from one character (< and >). In this case it is possible to use negations like [^>]. If you want to remove a substring delimited with character sequences (e.g. with begin and end), you should use non-greedy regular expressions (i.e. .*?).

I'd use a quick regular expression:
import re
Tt = "This is a <\"string\">string, It should be <\"changed\">changed to <\"a\">a number."
print re.sub("<[^<]+>","",Tt)
#Out: This is a string, It should be changed to a nummber.
Ah - similar to Igor's post, he beat my by a bit. Rather than making the expression non-greedy, I don't match an expression if it contains another start tag "<" in it, so it will only match a start tag that's followed by an end tag ">".

Python regular expression to replace everything but specific words

I am trying to do the following with a regular expression:
import re
x = re.compile('[^(going)|^(you)]') # words to replace
s = 'I am going home now, thank you.' # string to modify
print re.sub(x, '_', s)
The result I get is:
'_____going__o___no______n__you_'
The result I want is:
'_____going_________________you_'
Since the ^ can only be used inside brackets [], this result makes sense, but I'm not sure how else to go about it.
I even tried '([^g][^o][^i][^n][^g])|([^y][^o][^u])' but it yields '_g_h___y_'.

Not quite as easy as it first appears, since there is no "not" in REs except ^ inside [ ] which only matches one character (as you found). Here is my solution:
import re
def subit(m):
stuff, word = m.groups()
return ("_" * len(stuff)) + word
s = 'I am going home now, thank you.' # string to modify
print re.sub(r'(.+?)(going|you|$)', subit, s)
Gives:
_____going_________________you_
To explain. The RE itself (I always use raw strings) matches one or more of any character (.+) but is non-greedy (?). This is captured in the first parentheses group (the brackets). That is followed by either "going" or "you" or the end-of-line ($).
subit is a function (you can call it anything within reason) which is called for each substitution. A match object is passed, from which we can retrieve the captured groups. The first group we just need the length of, since we are replacing each character with an underscore. The returned string is substituted for that matching the pattern.

Here is a one regex approach:
>>> re.sub(r'(?!going|you)\b([\S\s]+?)(\b|$)', lambda x: (x.end() - x.start())*'_', s)
'_____going_________________you_'
The idea is that when you are dealing with words and you want to exclude them or etc. you need to remember that most of the regex engines (most of them use traditional NFA) analyze the strings by characters. And here since you want to exclude two word and want to use a negative lookahead you need to define the allowed strings as words (using word boundary) and since in sub it replaces the matched patterns with it's replace string you can't just pass the _ because in that case it will replace a part like I am with 3 underscore (I, ' ', 'am' ). So you can use a function to pass as the second argument of sub and multiply the _ with length of matched string to be replace.

Match single quotes from python re

How to match the following i want all the names with in the single quotes
This hasn't been much that much of a twist and turn's to 'Tom','Harry' and u know who..yes its 'rock'
How to extract the name within the single quotes only
name = re.compile(r'^\'+\w+\'')

The following regex finds all single words enclosed in quotes:
In [6]: re.findall(r"'(\w+)'", s)
Out[6]: ['Tom', 'Harry', 'rock']
Here:
the ' matches a single quote;
the \w+ matches one or more word characters;
the ' matches a single quote;
the parentheses form a capture group: they define the part of the match that gets returned by findall().
If you only wish to find words that start with a capital letter, the regex can be modified like so:
In [7]: re.findall(r"'([A-Z]\w*)'", s)
Out[7]: ['Tom', 'Harry']

I'd suggest
r = re.compile(r"\B'\w+'\B")
apos = r.findall("This hasn't been much that much of a twist and turn's to 'Tom','Harry' and u know who..yes its 'rock'")
Result:
>>> apos
["'Tom'", "'Harry'", "'rock'"]
The "negative word boundaries" (\B) prevent matches like the 'n' in words like Rock'n'Roll.
Explanation:
\B # make sure that we're not at a word boundary
' # match a quote
\w+ # match one or more alphanumeric characters
' # match a quote
\B # make sure that we're not at a word boundary

^ ('hat' or 'caret', among other names) in regex means "start of the string" (or, given particular options, "start of a line"), which you don't care about. Omitting it makes your regex work fine:
>>> re.findall(r'\'+\w+\'', s)
["'Tom'", "'Harry'", "'rock'"]
The regexes others have suggested might be better for what you're trying to achieve, this is the minimal change to fix your problem.

Your regex can only match a pattern following the start of the string. Try something like: r"'([^']*)'"