CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexdictionary
anushjay
anushjay

Reputation: 105

Regex to find dictionaries in string

I'm trying to write a regex for the following situation. I have a file with hundreds of dictionaries as string.

EG:

{'a':1'}
{{'a':1, 'b':2}{'c':3}}
{'a':4, 'b':6}

I read the file and removed the newlines. Now I'm trying split them based on a regex.

{'a':1'}{{'a':1, 'b':2}{'c':3}}{'a':4, 'b':6}

re.split("({.*?})", str). This wouldn't work because the whole second dict wouldn't match. How can I write a regex that would match all the lines return a list of dictionaries.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3263

Answers (2)

Jan
Jan

Reputation: 43199

You could simply do:

(\{[^{}]+\})
# look for an opening {
# and anything that is not { or }
# as well as an ending }

In Python this would be:

import re
rx = r'(\{[^{}]+\})'
string = "{'a':1'}{{'a':1, 'b':2}{'c':3}}{'a':4, 'b':6}"
matches = re.findall(rx, string)
print matches
# ["{'a':1'}", "{'a':1, 'b':2}", "{'c':3}", "{'a':4, 'b':6}"]

See a demo on regex101.com.

Upvotes: 3

RootTwo
RootTwo

Reputation: 4418

Python regular expressions are not able to handle nested structures by themselves. you would have to do some looping or recursion separately.

However, you commented above that each line is a json response. Why not use json.loads() on each line.

import json

with open('path_to_file', 'r') as f:
    data = [json.loads(line) for line in f]

data is now a list of dictionaries.

Upvotes: 0

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