Reputation: 9620
I am learning regular expressions. Don't understand how to match the following pattern:
" myArray = ["Var1","Var2"]; "
Ideally I want to get the data in the array and to convert into python array
Upvotes: 1
Views: 195
Reputation: 142256
Without using an re you could use builtin string methods and literal_eval
which given your example returns a usable list
object:
from ast import literal_eval
text = ' myArray = ["Var1","Var2"]; '
name, arr_text = (el.strip('; ') for el in text.split('='))
arr = literal_eval(arr_text)
print name, arr
Then do what you want with name
and arr
...
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 15996
If you are interested in just getting the data in the array, you can skip using regex and use eval instead. Consider this:
myArray = eval('["Var1","Var2"]')
If you must use the line you gave in the example, you can also use exec. However this command is somewhat dangerous and needs special care if used.
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 36
Regular expression complexity differs much depending on variations of input. The easiest expressions that matches given string are:
>>> from re import search, findall
>>> s = ' myArray = ["Var1","Var2"]; '
>>> name, body = search(r'\s*(\w*)\s*=\s*\[(.*)\]', s).groups(0)
>>> contents = findall(r'"(\w*)"', body)
>>> name, contents
('myArray', ['Var1', 'Var2'])
"Converting" to python array can be done like this:
>>> globals().update({name: contents})
>>> myArray
['Var1', 'Var2']
Though it is actually a bad idea as it writes garbage in globals. Instead, try using separate dictionary, or something.
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 617
Are the array items guaranteed to be surrounded by double-quotes?
This is a quick and dirty method:
re.findall('"([^,]+)"', source)
where source is your string.
I didn't escape the double-quotes in the regex since you can also use single-quotes in Python.
This returns a list of each item surrounded by double quotes
so in your example: ['Var1', 'Var2']
Upvotes: 2