Python regular expression to extract strings

Question

Here is my test sentence:

in setup or operation state, the blood warmer shall declare an urgent state if its liquid leakage sensor detects liquid leakage.

I want extract:

setup or operation

note that there maybe two or more state in the sentence,Just find the first one as the boundary.

(in (.*) (state|mode|phase|states))

but it couldn't find the first state...

ramwin · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-08 01:57:01Z

3

Regex is greedy by default. Your .* is matching all the way out to the next instance of "state", so you need to mark your .* as lazy with a ?.

The final regex is: (in (.*?) (state|mode|phase|states)).

More information can be seen at Regular expression operations.

ramwin

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answered Mar 8, 2021 at 1:33

wholevinski

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1 Comment

Maybe this is what he really wants? (?<=in ).*?(?=state|mode|phase|states)