CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
user2905545
user2905545

Reputation: 33

Find matched text in regular expression

I have a bunch of input string in the following (simplified) format:

"Hello my name is Dan"
"Hey my name is Tony"
"Hey|Hello|Hi my name is _"

I'm trying to write a regular expression to extract the name from the previous examples, but I'm stuck on how to do it.

I currently have

import re
r = re.search("(Hello|Hey|Hi) my name is .+")

How do I actually get the captured name?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 216

Answers (4)

Tom Jacques
Tom Jacques

Reputation: 705

You're actually not too far off. You're missing the supplied text to the regex, but I'm guessing you actually want to compile one to use later

import re
r = re.compile("(Hello|Hey|Hi) my name is (.+)")

... later

match = r.search(text)
if match:
    name = match.groups()[1]

What's going on here is that everything surrounded by parens is treated as a captured group. You can refer to it later if there's a match. You can also have named matches by using (?P<name>PATTERN)

Upvotes: 2

Aditya
Aditya

Reputation: 3158

Use groups to retrieve the part of your regex match. Here is an improved variant of your codelet:

import re
str = "Hello my name is Dan"
r = re.search("(Hello|Hey|Hi) my name is (.+)", str)
name = r.group(2)

I added parenthesis around (.+) so that they can be referred by the search object. group(0) is the complete matched string. group(1) is the first group - either of Hello, Hey or Hi. group(2) is the name.

Upvotes: 1

alko
alko

Reputation: 48287

You may use (\w+) match grouping.

But if "my name is" is expected to be in your strings, why not to use something alike r.split('my name is ', 1)[1].split(' ', 1)[0]

Upvotes: 1

Christian Ternus
Christian Ternus

Reputation: 8492

Try this:

import re
r = re.search("(?:Hello|Hey|Hi) my name is (\w+)", "Hello my name is Tony")
print r.groups()[0]

prints Tony.

Upvotes: 1

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