Get block of text in a txt file with regex in Python

Question

I'm just starting with python regular expressions. I read many topics but can't adapt solutions to my problem.

I've got a file like this one :

**** FILE.NAME ***
Fisrt sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

Second sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

I'm looking for a regex expression to extract several text blocks of my file :

Fisrt sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

Then :

Second sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

with a separation of sentences and blabla blocks. I tried something like this but not working :

^(\w+[^\n]*?)(.*)\n{2}

Alex · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-09 14:19:58Z

3

General rule of thumb: Don't use re when str methods suffice.

In this case you can call the .split() method on multiple newlines:

s.split('\n\n')

returns

['Fisrt sentence\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla',
 'Second sentence\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla']

answered Nov 9, 2018 at 14:19

Alex

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Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-09 14:37:57Z

0

You may use

re.findall(r'^(\w.*)\n([\s\S]*?)(?:\n{2,}|\Z)', text, re.M)

See the regex demo.

The pattern matches:

^ - start of a line (due to re.M, the ^ matches line start positions)
(\w.*) - Group 1: aword char followed with any 0+ chars other than line break chars
\n - a newline
([\s\S]*?) - Group 2: any 0+ chars, as few as possible
(?:\n{2,}|\Z) - either two or more newlines (\n{2,}) or (|) end of string (\Z).

answered Nov 9, 2018 at 14:37

Wiktor Stribiżew

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