Python RegEx finding all matches between certain strings-CodePudding

this is my first question!

I have a certain string looking like this (cutout):

"""
"random": [
    {
        "d3rdda": "dasd212dsadsa",
        "author": {
            "email": "[email protected]",
            "name": "John Doe"
        },
"""

I need to find all authors with the corresponding email adresses, so I want to get every match that starts with

"author": {

and ends with

}

because that would exactly give me

["email": "[email protected]", "name": "John Doe"]

Sadly, this is not working:

result = re.findall(r'\"author\": {. }$', ext)
print(result)

I'm very grateful for any support!

CodePudding user response：

This seems to work for this example, but every other line would have to have the same format

re.findall(r'\"author\".*\S \s .*\S \s .*\S \s }', ext)

CodePudding user response：

This isn't a good application for regex. Instead, you should deserialize it using the json library, and find any dict keys named "author" in the resulting object. This is easy to do using a recursive function:

def find_authors(obj):
    authors = [] # Empty list
    if isinstance(obj, dict): # If obj is a dict, iterate over its keys
        for key in obj:
            if key == "author": # If the key is author, then append it to our return list
                authors.append(obj[key])

            elif isinstance(obj[key], (list, dict)): 
                # Else, if the value is a list or a dict, then look for authors inside it 
                # and extend the original list with the result
                authors.extend(find_authors(obj[key]))

    elif isinstance(obj, list): # Else if it's a list, iterate over its elements
        for elem in obj:
            # Look for authors in each element of the list, and extend the main authors list
            authors.extend(find_authors(elem)) 

    return authors

import urllib.request
import json

r = urllib.request.urlopen("https://api.github.com/users/rotki/events/public")
txt = r.read()
jobj = json.loads(txt)

find_authors(jobj)

Which gives a list containing all "author" entries in the json. Note that this is an actual python list containing dictionaries, not a json string.

[{'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'},
 {'email': '[email protected]', 'name': 'Lefteris Karapetsas'}]