CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexnon-greedy
DanielSon
DanielSon

Reputation: 1545

Why is non-greedy Python Regex not non-greedy enough?

I've implemented non-greedy regex on a group of string URLs, where I'm trying to clean them up so that they end after the .com (.co.uk etc). Some of them continued with ' or " or < after the desired cutoff, and so I used x = re.findall('([A-Za-z0-9]+@\S+.co\S*?)[\'"<]', finalSoup2).

The problem is that some URLs are [email protected]'misc''misc' (or similar with < >) and so after implementing the non-greedy regex I'm still left with [email protected]">[email protected], for example.

I've tried two ??'s together, but obviously not working, so what's they proper way to acheive clean URLs in this situation?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 152

Answers (1)

Cory Shay
Cory Shay

Reputation: 1234

The issue with your regex is that you currently are only looking for Non-spaces(period)co instead of looking for Non-spaces(period)Non-spaces.

So in this case you could get away with the following regex based on the information above.

>>> finalSoup2 = """
... [email protected]'misc''misc
... [email protected]">[email protected]
... google.com
... google.co.uk"'<>Stuff
... """
>>>x = re.findall('([A-Za-z0-9]+@[^\'"<>]+)[\'"<]', finalSoup2)
>>>x
['[email protected]',
 '[email protected]',
 '[email protected]\ngoogle.com\ngoogle.co.uk']

Which you can then use to get the urls that you'd like but you'd have to make sure to split them on r'\n' as they may have a newline character within the text as seen above.

Upvotes: 2

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