Regular expression for returning lines of dialogue

Question

-I am a beginner python coder so bear with me!

• A line of complete dialog is defined as text that starts on its own line and starts and ends with double quotation marks (i.e. ").

what i have so far is,

def q_4():
  pattern = r'^\"\w*\"'
  return re.compile(pattern, re.M|re.IGNORECASE)

but for some reason it only returns one instance with one word between the two double quotes. How can i go about grasping full lines?

Answer 1

Try searching on the pattern \"[^"]+\":

inp = """Here is a quote: "the quick brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog" and here is another "blah
blah blah" the end"""

dialogs = re.findall(r'\"([^"]+)\"', inp)
print(dialogs)

This prints:

['the quick brown fox jumps over\nthe lazy dog', 'blah\nblah blah']