I'm working with regular expressions in Python and I'm struggling with this. I have data in a file of lines like this one:
|person=[[Old McDonald]]
and I just want to be able to extract Old McDonald from this line.
I have been trying with this regular expression:
matchLine = re.match(r"\|[a-z]+=(\[\[)?[A-Z][a-z]*(\]\])", line)
print matchLine
but it doesn't work; None is the result each time.
Construct [A-Z][a-z]* does not match Old McDonald. You probably should use something like [A-Z][A-Za-z ]*. Here is code example:
import re
line = '|person=[[Old McDonald]]'
matchLine = re.match ('\|[a-z]+=(?:\[\[)?([A-Z][A-Za-z ]*)\]\]', line)
print matchLine.group (1)
The output is Old McDonald for me. If you need to search in the middle of the string, use re.search instead of re.match:
import re
line = 'blahblahblah|person=[[Old McDonald]]blahblahblah'
matchLine = re.search ('\|[a-z]+=(?:\[\[)?([A-Z][A-Za-z ]*)\]\]', line)
print matchLine.group (1)
re.match searches in the beginning of the string only. If you want to search for possible occurences in the middle of the string, use re.search instead.
line?