CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexpython-3.x
Henry
Henry

Reputation: 31

Python Multiline Match End of String

I'm trying to match until I hit a pattern("this" ignoring any white spaces between start of line and pattern) or until the end of a string in a paragraph by using:

r'.*?(?=^[^\S\n]*this|$)'

This regex string works fine if my string is only one line($ matches an end of line). However I could not find the regex to match a end of string, so is there a clean way around this? The following is my code:

import re  
a_str="""\  
paragraph starts here  
another line
this line may or may not exist"""  
a_match = re.compile(r'.*?(?=^[^\S\n]*this|$)', re.MULTILINE|re.DOTALL).match(a_str)

EDIT:

Expected output: 

"paragraph starts here\nanother line"

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1978

Answers (2)

George
George

Reputation: 151

It's now possible to denote the very end of string in multi-line mode with '\Z'.

Ref: https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/re.html

Upvotes: 3

Henry
Henry

Reputation: 31

Seems like removing the extra '|$' in the look ahead did the trick.
Look ahead also matches end of string apparently - I'm assuming

r'.*?(?=^[^\S\n]*this)'

Upvotes: 0

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