Regex findall in Python [duplicate]-CodePudding

I have a simple list in a text file:

animal
ball
cat
dog
elephant
fox

I am trying to get Python 3.8 to search the list and return everything from ball to dog, inclusive. The contents of this text file are in the data variable:

x = re.findall("ball(.*\n)*?.*dog", data) 'a'
print(x)

On regexr.com and in Notepad this works fine:

ball
cat
dog

but in Python the result is:

'cat\n'

How can I make it work the way I want in Python?

CodePudding user response：

I dont understand why you need findall() in the first place..

re.search() itself is enough to accomplish this..

In [1]: import re 
   ...: str1= 'animal,ball,cat,dog,elephant,fox' 
   ...: m = re.search("(ball.*dog)", str1) 
   ...:                                                                                                                               

In [2]: m.groups()                                                                                                                    
Out[2]: ('ball,cat,dog',)

CodePudding user response：

Make the group non-capturing because if there is just one capturing group, findall returns a list of strings matching just that group.

"ball(?:.*\n)*?.*dog"

Alternatives:

ball(?:.|\s)*?dog
(?s)ball.*?dog

CodePudding user response：

I am assuming that your string is separated by newline (\n).

Try this:

string = """
animal
ball
cat
dog
elephant
fox
"""
matches = re.findall(r"ball[\w\n] dog", string)
if matches:
    list_of_animals = matches[0].split("\n")
    print(list_of_animals)

CodePudding user response：

You can use search function of re instead of findall and then use group function of re.Match object

import re

data = """
animal
ball
cat
dog
elephant
fox
"""
x = re.search("ball(.*\n)*?.*dog", data)
print(x.group())