I have a string that have this format:
some text <br>septembar 1989<br>
And I'm using this regex find the month and year part
<br/?>(?!=b\.)(.*?\b\d{4}\b)
and I get what i want-septembar 1989
However, I now have situation when <br> is inserted
<br>some text <br>septembar 1989<br>
result: some text <br>septembar 1989
Can you suggest how to modify my existing pattern to support both cases? I guess I need somehow to exlude <br> from matching in .*?
Try this
<br/?>([^<]+)\d{4}
[^<] means match anything except an opening tag which is what you want.
I written a simple code, may be you find helpful unto some extend:
import re
def getDate(str):
m = re.match("[\<br>]*[\w\s]*\<br>([\w\s]*[12][0-9]{3})",str);
return m.group(1)
print getDate("some text <br>dec 1989<br>");
print getDate("<br> some text <br>septembar 1989<br>");
print getDate("grijesh chuahan <br>feb 2009<br>");
Output:
dec 1989
septembar 1989
feb 2009
import re
ss = 'dfgqeg<br>some text <br>septembar 1989<br>'
reg = re.compile('<br(?: /)?>'
'(?!.+?<br(?: /)?>.+?<br(?: /)?>)'
'(.+?\d{4})'
'<br(?: /)?>')
print reg.search(ss).group(1)
.
'<br(?: /)?>' catches <br> and <br /> occurrences.
'(?!.+?<br(?: /)?>.+?<br(?: /)?>)' is a look-ahead assertion,
it verifies that after the position where it starts in the analyzed text, there isn't the suite of characters described as a succession of :
.+? any kind of characters, but the ? orders that this portion must stop as soon as <br> or <br /> is encountered <br> or <br /> <br> or <br /> <br> or <br /> 