CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
Louis93
Louis93

Reputation: 3923

How do I grab a number sandwiched between commas?

The following are Python snippets

line = '3520005,"Toronto (Ont.)",C ,F,2503281,2481494,F,F,0.9,1040597,979330,630.1763,3972.4,1\r\n' and I want to be able to get the first number sandwiched between two commas which in this case would be ,2503281,

However, what I came up with doesn't seem to work properly: m = re.search("\,([0-9])*\,",line) only retains the last digit in the number.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 161

Answers (3)

dawg
dawg

Reputation: 103814

Be warned that using a regex for parsing comma separated values is fraught with oversights, fragility and potential errors. If you can coerce this into something the csv module can do -- you will be better off.

That said, this works:

import re

st='''line = '3520005,"Toronto (Ont.)",
C ,F,2503281,2481494,F,F,0.9,1040597,979330,630.1763,3972.4,1\r\n'''

print re.findall(r"(\d+\.?\d*)",st)

prints:

['3520005', '2503281', '2481494', '0.9', '1040597', '979330', '630.1763', '3972.4', '1']

Here is the regex explanation.

Upvotes: 0

sberry
sberry

Reputation: 132018

Here is a non-regex solution:

>>> [item for item in line.split(',')[1:] if item.isdigit()][0]
'2503281'

Upvotes: 3

Explosion Pills
Explosion Pills

Reputation: 191749

The asterisk needs to go inside of the parentheses:

`",([0-9]*),"

Otherwise you only capture one of the digits. You also don't need the backslashes before the commas, but that doesn't matter.

You may also want to use + instead of * to ensure that there is at least one digit, or even set a min/max limit on digits using {}.

Upvotes: 3

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