I would like to use a regex to do the following in Python:
I am given a list of strings such as: 'abc01 - [def02] - ghi03 - jkl04'
Each string will have a different number of items. Some will have brackets around and some will not.
Can someone help me with a regex match that will consist solely of items not in brackets? Dashes and spaces would need to be removed. So for the example above the output would be: [abc01, ghi03, jkl04]
Thanks
Is regex really the best tool for the job?
>>> S = 'abc01 - [def02] - ghi03 - jkl04'
>>> [x for x in S.split(' - ') if not (x.startswith('[') or x.endswith(']'))]
['abc01', 'ghi03', 'jkl04']
>>> a='abc01 - [def02] - ghi03 - jkl04'
>>> [ i for i in a.split(" - ") if "[" not in i ]
['abc01', 'ghi03', 'jkl04']
The following regex will solve your problem:
\b(?<!\[)\w+
The Python code is then:
for match in re.finditer(r"\b(?<!\[)\w+", input_line):
item = match.group()
Notes:
\b asserts that the item starts at a word break, not in the middle of an item(?<!\[) asserts that the item wasn't preceded by a [\w+ matches an item of at least one consecutive word character, as many as possibleFrom the above description you just need to use findall() to match any sequence of letters and numbers (using the short code \w to match letters and numbers below).
>>> import re
>>> re.findall(r'\w+', 'abc01 - [def02] - ghi03 - jkl04')
['abc01', 'def02', 'ghi03', 'jkl04']
