I am trying to read movie names and years. The pattern is as follows:
name (year). The name of the movie can have all sorts of characters. And I came up with this pattern:
^(?P<name>.*) \((?P<year>\d*)\)
However, not all movies come with a year after them, so I would like make the year group optional such that it returns blank if only the name of the movie is there.
I know I can make the year optional with ? but then it ends up becoming part of the name group.
CodePudding user response：
Your first part is too greedy. If you make the second part optional it will match everything. So, * → *?
Then you can use a optional non-capturing group for the year. And don't forget to mark the end:
^(?P<name>.*?)(?: \((?P<year>\d*)\))?$