CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
Mauro Gentile
Mauro Gentile

Reputation: 1511

regex to extract mentions in Twitter

I need to write a regex in python to extract mentions from Tweets.

My attempt:

regex=re.compile(r"(?<=^|(?<=[^a-zA-Z0-9-_\.]))@([A-Za-z]+[A-Za-z0-9]+)")

It works fine for any mention like @mickey However, in mentions with underscores like @mickey_mouse, it only extracts @mickey.

How can I modify the regex for it to work in both cases?

Thank you

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2096

Answers (2)

Alex
Alex

Reputation: 3431

A shorter version, including the negative cases from @degant:

(?<=@)\w+

Upvotes: 0

degant
degant

Reputation: 4981

Add an underscore to the last set like this:

(?<=^|(?<=[^a-zA-Z0-9-_\.]))@([A-Za-z]+[A-Za-z0-9_]+)

Regex101 Demo

On a side note, Twitter Handle rules allow you to have usernames starting with numbers & underscores as well. So to extract twitter handles a regex could be as simple as: @\w{1,15} (allows characters, numbers and underscores and includes the 15 character limit). Will need some additional lookaheads/lookbehinds based on where the regex might be used.

Upvotes: 4

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