Python match tuples in string

Question

I have a string with the format:

s = "[(1,2,'foe'), (3,5,'bar'), ...]"

I need to extract each tuple using regular expressions.

I tried stripping '[' and ']' and then apply

re.findall(r'\((\d+),(\d+),(.+)\)', s[1:-1])

and other variants but cannot make it work.

N.B: This pattern is not recursive, it's repeating. A recursive one would be like: [(1, [(2, [(3, [...])])])] — handras
– handras, Commented Nov 22, 2018 at 20:00

timgeb · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-22 19:39:09Z

4

It looks like you have a list-literal. You don't evaluate those with regex, you throw ast.literal_eval on it and are done.

>>> from ast import literal_eval
>>> literal_eval("[(1,2,'foe'), (3,5,'bar')]")
[(1, 2, 'foe'), (3, 5, 'bar')]

answered Nov 22, 2018 at 19:39

timgeb

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1 Comment

thats exactly what I needed!! Thanks very much. Sorry I didn't know about ast module.