How to return a date from a text using regex?-CodePudding

I have next code:

import re

text = "Hi! Today is  24/10/2021 and we will have an importan event"

def searchForDate(text):
    getDate = re.match('(^(((0[1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-8])[\/](0[1-9]|1[012]))|((29|30|31)[\/](0[13578]|1[02]))|((29|30)[\/](0[4,6,9]|11)))[\/](19|[2-9][0-9])\d\d$)|(^29[\/]02[\/](19|[2-9][0-9])(00|04|08|12|16|20|24|28|32|36|40|44|48|52|56|60|64|68|72|76|80|84|88|92|96)$)', text)
    if getDate:
        return getDate
    else:
        return 'Text doesn´t contain any date'

print(searchForDate(text))

And what I want is to return date from a text using regex with dd/mm/yyyy format, for example get in console:

'24/10/2021'

But instead of that I just get:

'Text doesn´t contain any date'

I have tried with other regular expression with dd/mm/yyyy format, but my code stills showing in console Text doesn´t contain any date. I hope you can help me, thanks!

CodePudding user response：

May be this will help

import re

text = "Hi! Today is  24/10/2021 and we will have an important event"

data = re.findall("../../....", text)

print(data)

['24/10/2021']

CodePudding user response：

The anchors are causing the match to fail. If you want a date embedded in another string you can use something like

(((0[1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-8])[\/](0[1-9]|1[012]))|((29|30|31)[\/](0[13578]|1[02]))|((29|30)[\/](0[4,6,9]|11)))[\/](19|[2-9][0-9])\d\d|29[\/]02[\/](19|[2-9][0-9])(00|04|08|12|16|20|24|28|32|36|40|44|48|52|56|60|64|68|72|76|80|84|88|92|96) as your regex (note the removed anchors from both expressions).

CodePudding user response：

Your regex matches on the full string, for two reasons. You used anchors to the star (^) and end ($) of line, and re.match matches only at the beginning. You should remove your anchors and use re.search

CodePudding user response：

You can use '\d' for matching any digit and set the count of it by '{}'. Then, if match is true, you must use .group() to extract the date:

import re


def searchForDate(text):
    date = re.search(r"\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{4}", text)

    if date:
        return date.group()
    else:
        return 'Text doesn´t contain any date'


text = "Hi! Today is  24/10/2021 and we will have an importan event"

print(searchForDate(text))