I want to use regex to search in a file for this expression:
time:<float> s
I only want to get the float number.
I'm learning about regex, and this is what I did:
astr = 'lalala time:1.5 s\n'
p = re.compile(r'time:(\d+).*(\d+)')
m = p.search(astr)
Well, I get time:1.5 from m.group(0)
How can I directly just get 1.5 ?
I'm including some extra python-specific materiel since you said you're learning regex. As already mentioned the simplest regex for this would certainly be \d+\.\d+ in various commands as described below.
Something that threw me off with python initially was getting my head around the return types of various re methods and when to use group() vs. groups().
There are several methods you might use:
re.match()
re.search()
re.findall()
match() will only return an object if the pattern is found at the beginning of the string.
search() will find the first pattern and top.
findall() will find everything in the string.
The return type for match() and search() is a match object, __Match[T], or None, if a match isn't found. However the return type for findall() is a list[T]. These different return types obviously have ramifications for how you get the values out of your match.
Both match and search expose the group() and groups() methods for retrieving your matches. But when using findall you'll want to iterate through your list or pull a value with an enumerator. So using findall:
>>>import re
>>>easy = re.compile(r'123')
>>>matches = easy.findall(search_me)
>>>for match in matches: print match
123
If you're using search() or match(), you'll want to use .group() or groups() to retrieve your match depending on how you've set up your regular expression.
From the documentation, "The groups() method returns a tuple containing the strings for all the subgroups, from 1 up to however many there are."
Therefore if you have no groups in your regex, as shown in the following example, you wont get anything back:
>>>import re
>>>search_me = '123abc'
>>>easy = re.compile(r'123')
>>>matches = easy.search(search_me)
>>>print matches.groups()
()
Adding a "group" to your regular expression enables you to use this:
>>>import re
>>>search_me = '123abc'
>>>easy = re.compile(r'(123)')
>>>matches = easy.search(search_me)
>>>print matches.groups()
('123',)
You don't have to specify groups in your regex. group(0) or group() will return the entire match even if you don't have anything in parenthesis in your expression. --group() defaults to group(0).
>>>import re
>>>search_me = '123abc'
>>>easy = re.compile(r'123')
>>>matches = easy.search(search_me)
>>>print matches.group(0)
123
If you are using parenthesis you can use group to match specific groups and subgroups.
>>>import re
>>>search_me = '123abc'
>>>easy = re.compile(r'((1)(2)(3))')
>>>matches = easy.search(search_me)
>>>print matches.group(1)
>>>print matches.group(2)
>>>print matches.group(3)
>>>print matches.group(4)
123
1
2
3
I'd like to point as well that you don't have to compile your regex unless you care to for reasons of usability and/or readability. It won't improve your performance.
>>>import re
>>>search_me = '123abc'
>>>#easy = re.compile(r'123')
>>>#matches = easy.search(search_me)
>>>matches = re.search(r'123', search_me)
>>>print matches.group()
Hope this helps! I found sites like debuggex helpful while learning regex. (Although sometimes you have to refresh those pages; I was banging my head for a couple hours one night before I realized that after reloading the page my regex worked just fine.) Lately I think you're served just as well by throwing sandbox code into something like wakari.io, or an IDE like PyCharm, etc., and observing the output. http://www.rexegg.com/ is also a good site for general regex knowledge.
You could do create another group for that. And I would also change the regex slightly to allow for numbers that don't have a decimal separator.
re.compile(r'time:((\d+)(\.?(\d+))?')
Now you can use group(1) to capture the match of the floating point number.
I think the regex you actually want is something more like:
re.compile(r'time:(\d+\.\d+)')
or even:
re.compile(r'time:(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)') # This one will capture integers too.
Note that I've put the entire time into 1 grouping. I've also escaped the . which means any character in regex.
Then, you'd get 1.5 from m.group(1) -- m.group(0) is the entire match. m.group(1) is the first submatch (parenthesized grouping), m.group(2) is the second grouping, etc.
example:
>>> import re
>>> p = re.compile(r'time:(\d+(?:\.\d+)?)')
>>> p.search('time:34')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10fa77d50>
>>> p.search('time:34').group(1)
'34'
>>> p.search('time:34.55').group(1)
'34.55'
Related
I do not consider myself a newbie in regex, but I seem to have found a problem that stumped me (it's also Friday evening, so brain not at peak performance).
I am trying to substitute a place-holder inside a string with some other value. I am having great difficulty getting a syntax that behaves the way I want.
My place-holder has this format: {swap}
I want it to capture and replace these:
{swap} # NewValue
x{swap}x # xNewValuex
{swap}x # NewValuex
x{swap} # xNewValue
But I want it to NOT match these:
{{swap}} # NOT {NewValue}
x{{swap}}x # NOT x{NewValue}x
{{swap}}x # NOT {NewValue}x
x{{swap}} # NOT x{NewValue}
In all of the above, x can be any string, of any length, be it "word" or not.
I'm trying to do this using python3's re.sub() but anytime I satisfy one subset of criteria I lose another in the process. I'm starting to think it might not be possible to do in a single command.
Cheers!
If you're able to use the newer regex module, you can use (*SKIP)(*FAIL):
{{.*?}}(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|{.*?}
See a demo on regex101.com.
Broken down, this says:
{{.*?}}(*SKIP)(*FAIL) # match any {{...}} and "throw them away"
| # or ...
{.*?} # match your desired pattern
In Python this would be:
import regex as re
rx = re.compile(r'{{.*?}}(*SKIP)(*FAIL)|{.*?}')
string = """
{swap}
x{swap}x
{swap}x
x{swap}
{{swap}}
x{{swap}}x
{{swap}}x
x{{swap}}"""
string = rx.sub('NewValue', string)
print(string)
This yields:
NewValue
xNewValuex
NewValuex
xNewValue
{{swap}}
x{{swap}}x
{{swap}}x
x{{swap}}
For the sake of completeness, you can also achieve this with Python's own re module but here, you'll need a slightly adjusted pattern as well as a replacement function:
import re
rx = re.compile(r'{{.*?}}|({.*?})')
string = """
{swap}
x{swap}x
{swap}x
x{swap}
{{swap}}
x{{swap}}x
{{swap}}x
x{{swap}}"""
def repl(match):
if match.group(1) is not None:
return "NewValue"
else:
return match.group(0)
string = rx.sub(repl, string)
print(string)
Use negative lookahead and lookbehind:
s1 = "x{swap}x"
s2 = "x{{swap}}x"
pattern = r"(?<!\{)\{[^}]+\}(?!})"
re.sub(pattern, "foo", s1)
#'xfoox'
re.sub(pattern, "foo", s2)
#'x{{swap}}x'
I'm using a Python script to read data from our corporate instance of JIRA. There is a value that is returned as a string and I need to figure out how to extract one bit of info from it. What I need is the 'name= ....' and I just need the numbers from that result.
<class 'list'>: ['com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint#6f68eefa[id=30943,rapidViewId=10468,state=CLOSED,name=2016.2.4 - XXXXXXXXXX,startDate=2016-05-26T08:50:57.273-07:00,endDate=2016-06-08T20:59:00.000-07:00,completeDate=2016-06-09T07:34:41.899-07:00,sequence=30943]']
I just need the 2016.2.4 portion of it. This number will not always be the same either.
Any thoughts as how to do this with RE? I'm new to regular expressions and would appreciate any help.
A simple regular expression can do the trick: name=([0-9.]+).
The primary part of the regex is ([0-9.]+) which will search for any digit (0-9) or period (.) in succession (+).
Now, to use this:
import re
pattern = re.compile('name=([0-9.]+)')
string = '''<class 'list'>: ['com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint#6f68eefa[id=30943,rapidViewId=10468,state=CLOSED,name=2016.2.4 - XXXXXXXXXX,startDate=2016-05-26T08:50:57.273-07:00,endDate=2016-06-08T20:59:00.000-07:00,completeDate=2016-06-09T07:34:41.899-07:00,sequence=30943]']'''
matches = pattern.search(string)
# Only assign the value if a match is found
name_value = '' if not matches else matches.group(1)
Use a capturing group to extract the version name:
>>> import re
>>> s = 'com.atlassian.greenhopper.service.sprint.Sprint#6f68eefa[id=30943,rapidViewId=10468,state=CLOSED,name=2016.2.4 - XXXXXXXXXX,startDate=2016-05-26T08:50:57.273-07:00,endDate=2016-06-08T20:59:00.000-07:00,completeDate=2016-06-09T07:34:41.899-07:00,sequence=30943]'
>>> re.search(r"name=([0-9.]+)", s).group(1)
'2016.2.4'
where ([0-9.]+) is a capturing group matching one or more digits or dots, parenthesis define a capturing group.
A non-regex option would involve some splitting by ,, = and -:
>>> l = [item.split("=") for item in s.split(",")]
>>> next(value[1] for value in l if value[0] == "name").split(" - ")[0]
'2016.2.4'
This, of course, needs testing and error handling.
>>> import re
>>> s = 'this is a test'
>>> reg1 = re.compile('test$')
>>> match1 = reg1.match(s)
>>> print match1
None
in Kiki that matches the test at the end of the s. What do I miss? (I tried re.compile(r'test$') as well)
Use
match1 = reg1.search(s)
instead. The match function only matches at the start of the string ... see the documentation here:
Python offers two different primitive operations based on regular expressions: re.match() checks for a match only at the beginning of the string, while re.search() checks for a match anywhere in the string (this is what Perl does by default).
Your regex does not match the full string. You can use search instead as Useless mentioned, or you can change your regex to match the full string:
'^this is a test$'
Or somewhat harder to read but somewhat less useless:
'^t[^t]*test$'
It depends on what you're trying to do.
It's because of that match method returns None if it couldn't find expected pattern, if it find the pattern it would return an object with type of _sre.SRE_match .
So, if you want Boolean (True or False) result from match you must check the result is None or not!
You could examine texts are matched or not somehow like this:
string_to_evaluate = "Your text that needs to be examined"
expected_pattern = "pattern"
if re.match(expected_pattern, string_to_evaluate) is not None:
print("The text is as you expected!")
else:
print("The text is not as you expected!")
I'm tackling a python challenge problem to find a block of text in the format xXXXxXXXx (lower vs upper case, not all X's) in a chunk like this:
jdskvSJNDfbSJneSfnJDKoJIWhsjnfakjn
I have tested the following RegEx and found it correctly matches what I am looking for from this site (http://www.regexr.com/):
'([a-z])([A-Z]){3}([a-z])([A-Z]){3}([a-z])'
However, when I try to match this expression to the block of text, it just returns the entire string:
In [1]: import re
In [2]: example = 'jdskvSJNDfbSJneSfnJDKoJIWhsjnfakjn'
In [3]: expression = re.compile(r'([a-z])([A-Z]){3}([a-z])([A-Z]){3}([a-z])')
In [4]: found = expression.search(example)
In [5]: print found.string
jdskvSJNDfbSJneSfnJDKoJIWhsjnfakjn
Any ideas? Is my expression incorrect? Also, if there is a simpler way to represent that expression, feel free to let me know. I'm fairly new to RegEx.
You need to return the match group instead of the string attribute.
>>> import re
>>> s = 'jdskvSJNDfbSJneSfnJDKoJIWhsjnfakjn'
>>> rgx = re.compile(r'[a-z][A-Z]{3}[a-z][A-Z]{3}[a-z]')
>>> found = rgx.search(s).group()
>>> print found
nJDKoJIWh
The string attribute always returns the string passed as input to the match. This is clearly documented:
string
The string passed to match() or search().
The problem has nothing to do with the matching, you're just grabbing the wrong thing from the match object. Use match.group(0) (or match.group()).
Based on xXXXxXXXx if you want upper letters with len 3 and lower with len 1 between them this is what you want :
([a-z])(([A-Z]){3}([a-z]))+
also you can get your search function with group()
print expression.search(example).group(0)
Regex to retrieve the last portion of a string:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump
I'm looking to retrieve the string followed by id=
The following regex didn't seem to work in python
sampleURL = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump"
re.search("id=(.*?)", sampleURL).group(1)
The above should give me an output:
com.lima.doodlejump
Is my search group right?
Your regular expression
(.*?)
will not work because, it will match between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible (becasue of the ?). So, you have the following choices of RegEx
(.*) # Matches the rest of the string
(.*?)$ # Matches till the end of the string
But, you don't need RegEx at all here, simply split the string like this
data = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump"
print data.split("id=", 1)[-1]
Output
com.lima.doodlejump
If you really have to use RegEx, you can do like this
data = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump"
import re
print re.search("id=(.*)", data).group(1)
Output
com.lima.doodlejump
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned urlparse yet...
>>> s = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump"
>>> urlparse.urlparse(s)
ParseResult(scheme='https', netloc='play.google.com', path='/store/apps/details', params='', query='id=com.lima.doodlejump', fragment='')
>>> urlparse.parse_qs(urlparse.urlparse(s).query)
{'id': ['com.lima.doodlejump']}
>>> urlparse.parse_qs(urlparse.urlparse(s).query)['id']
['com.lima.doodlejump']
>>> urlparse.parse_qs(urlparse.urlparse(s).query)['id'][0]
'com.lima.doodlejump'
The HUGE advantage here is that if the url query string gets more components then it could easily break the other solutions which rely on a simple str.split. It won't confuse urlparse however :).
Just split it in the place you want:
id = url.split('id=')[1]
If you print id, you'll get:
com.lima.doodlejump
Regex isn't needed here :)
However, in case there are multiple id=s in your string, and you only wanted the last one:
id = url.split('id=')[-1]
Hope this helps!
This works:
>>> import re
>>> sampleURL = "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lima.doodlejump"
>>> re.search("id=(.+)", sampleURL).group(1)
'com.lima.doodlejump'
>>>
Instead of capturing non-greedily for zero or more characters, this code captures greedily for one or more.