Problems with using alphabet selectors in regex

Question

My String looks like this:

"Jothijohnsamyperiyasamy"

I want only "Jothijohnsamy" from the above string. The Regular expression,

'Jo\w+samy'

prints "Jothijohnsamyperiyasamy", but I want only "Jothijohnsamy". Any Ideas?

Make the `\w+?` non greedy `Jo\w+?samy` – The fourth bird Sep 16 '18 at 11:11 — The fourth bird, Sep 16 '18 at 11:11

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 16 '18 at 11:11

0

Try non-greedy match:

>>> re.compile(r"Jo\w+?samy").match("Jothijohnsamyperiyasamy")
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 13), match='Jothijohnsamy'>
>>> _.group()
'Jothijohnsamy'

The +? token means "match 1 or more times, but as few as possible. Without the question mark it means "match 1 or more times, as many as possible".

Another straightforward example: For the string "aaaaaa", the regex a+ matches all characters, but a+? matches only one (as few as possible), and a*? matches none.

answered Sep 16 '18 at 11:11

iBug

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Thanks.@iBug Actually I have a string like this. """JothiNewsamyJothiPeriyasamy\n Josamy\n\n Jo samy""". The output Should be ['JothiNewsamy','JothiPeriyasamy','Josamy','Jo samy']. How to write a regular expression for this? – Jothi Periyasamy Manoharan Sep 16 '18 at 11:44
@JothiPeriyasamyManoharan Use `compiled_re.findall()`, and change `\w+` to `.*?`. – iBug Sep 16 '18 at 11:47
Thank you so much. It worked with this one: `re.findall(r"Jo[\w\s]*?samy" ` – Jothi Periyasamy Manoharan Sep 16 '18 at 12:19

Problems with using alphabet selectors in regex

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