I am trying to match a datatime inside square brackets and I thought prefixing "\" would be the way to encode square brackets but somehow it didn't work. Here is my code:
import re
line_nginx = re.compile(r"""\[(?P<time_local>\S+) -700\]""", re.IGNORECASE)
match = line_nginx.match("[07/Oct/2014:19:43:08 -0700]")
if match:
print("matched")
else:
print("no match")
I got "no match". Any idea what went wrong?
\[(?P<time_local>\S+)\s+-0700\]
Try this.You have 0700 instead of 700.Also add \s+instead of space in your regex to make it less fragile.
See demo.
Change your regex to,
\[(?P<time_local>\S+) -0700\]
OR
\[(?P<time_local>\S+)\s+-0700\]
It's not the problem with escaping the starting or closing square bracket . You failed to add 0 before the number 7, so your regex wouldn't match the input string.
>>> import re
>>> line_nginx = re.compile(r"\[(?P<time_local>\S+)\s+-0700\]", re.IGNORECASE)
>>> match = line_nginx.match("[07/Oct/2014:19:43:08 -0700]")
>>> if match:
... print("matched")
... else:
... print("no match")
...
matched
