excluding specific strings from regex search

Question

I have such a regex:

(&lt;.*?&gt;)

It allows me to find all the substrings starting with < and ending with >.

For instance, like the following:

&lt;IL_A_NUM&gt;

My regex expression helps me to find the strings as above. The expression .*? involves all characters, but I want to exclude strings with < or > inside from my search. So, if < or > appears between another < and > my search won't give me that subpart.

How should I modify my regular expression?

My plan is, firstly finding the inner part, and replacing it with another string, and recursively proceeding until when I reach to the outer boundary. I want to replace the last outer part with another string anyway. — yusuf
– yusuf, Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 11:46
So just do this re.sub(r'(<)(.*)(>)', r'\1your_last_character_to_replace\3', your_string) — Kasravnd
– Kasravnd, Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 11:51
@yusuf Python's builtin re library doesn't support recursion/nested groupings... do you have some better examples of exactly what you're trying to achieve as this seems to be a bit of an XY Problem — Jon Clements
– Jon Clements, Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 11:51

Kasravnd · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-21 12:38:46Z

1

For matching the outer sub-string you need to drop the ? and for replacing the inner matched you can just use re.sub like following:

re.sub(r'(&lt;)(.*)(&gt;)', r'\1your_last_character_to_replace\3', your_string)

answered Feb 21, 2017 at 12:38

Kasravnd

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