get text in between multiple flags using regex

Question

i have the following text :

The first Heading This is heading 1 data

The second header : this is heading 2 data

third header this is heading 3 data

So, i am trying to write a single regex. i know for a fact that to extract data between heading 1 and heading 2, the following regex will work

The first Heading(.*?)The second header

The above will give the text "This is heading 1 data". But, what i am trying to get is to look for all the heading's that is a regex, which will return a list as follows

["This is heading 1 data","This is heading 2 data","This is heading 3 data"]

What i had in mind was the following

The first Heading(.*?)The second header(.*?)third header (.*?)

But, i am not getting any data for the above regex. can anyone help me with the solution

Use the DOTALL mode as you have linebreaks (at least in your sample). — Jan
– Jan, Commented May 7, 2018 at 10:01
@Kalyan Regex is about matching patterns of text. What is the heading pattern? If you cannot define it, you can hardly devise a reliable regex pattern to match it. — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented May 7, 2018 at 10:08
There was a similar question today. See stackoverflow.com/a/50206391/3832970. Basically, you may use re.split(r'[\r\n]+(?:{})(?:\s*:)?\s*'.format('|'.join(my_heading_list)), s) — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented May 7, 2018 at 10:19
Does that work for you? Please post the list of headings you have. Or can there be arbitrary texts in between/before/after the headings? — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented May 7, 2018 at 10:50
Please compile the list of known headings, and use them with the code I suggested above. — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented May 7, 2018 at 11:20

zipa · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-07 10:19:31Z

1

This should do it:

import re

a = '''Heading 1 This is heading 1 data
Heading 2 This is heading 2 data
Heading 3 This is heading 3 data'''

print(re.findall('(?<=Heading \d\s)(.*)(?:Heading \d|$)?', a)))
#['This is heading 1 data', 'This is heading 2 data', 'This is heading 3 data']

answered May 7, 2018 at 10:19

zipa

28k6 gold badges45 silver badges62 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

get text in between multiple flags using regex

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related