CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
CarefullyAdvanced
CarefullyAdvanced

Reputation: 467

Python Regex stop on string

So I want to search using regex for seasons which are not followed by episode number and I have the following list :

string = ['Fear the walking dead Season 2 Episode 9',
'Veep Season 5',
'Martine Season 2 (unknown number of episodes)',
'New Girl Season 5 Episode 16']

I've written this code re.search('.+? Season [0-9]{1,2}', string, re.I) but it seems to take into consideration the series with an episode number also. I want it to return True only on Veep Season 5

Upvotes: 1

Views: 772

Answers (2)

TauOmicronMu
TauOmicronMu

Reputation: 76

From previous experience, I'd suggest not solely doing this with regex, but I've quickly thrown together the following snippet (after which no_episode_string will contain all of the ones without episodes).

For each season we match against ".?[0-9](.*)", which simply grabs everything up to and including the first time we encounter a number, and then take the rest of the string, which will either be empty (if there is no episode number), or non-empty if there is an episode number.

So we just check whether it is empty or not, and if it is, then we add the whole thing to no_episode_string.

import re

string = ['Fear the walking dead Season 2 Episode 9',
'Veep Season 5',
'Martine Season 2 (unknown number of episodes)',
'New Girl Seasoon 5 Episode 16']

no_episode_string = []

for season in string: 
    m = re.search('.*?[0-9]+(.*)', season)
    if m.group(1) == "":
        no_episode_string.append(m.group(0))

Upvotes: 2

depperm
depperm

Reputation: 10746

I would recommend using ^ and $ to match from the beginning of a line to the end. So you can change your regex to:

re.search('^(.+?Season\s[0-9]{1,2})$', string, re.I | re.M)

Upvotes: 3

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