Question

I am attempting to write a regex in Python to extract part of a paragraph.

In the below paragraph, the part I wish to extract is bolded.

Proposal will boost bailout fund, inject cash into banks and cut
Greek debt says reports.

My regex and output as follows,

>>> text = 'Proposal will boost bailout fund, inject cash into banks and cut Greek debt says reports.'
>>> pattern = re.compile(r'(boost bailout)+?([\s\S]*?)(debt)+?')
>>> print re.findall(pattern, text)

[('boost bailout', ' fund, inject cash into banks and cut Greek ', 'debt')]

Although it does extract the correct section, is it right that the extraction is separated into 3 parts in a tuple and not just a single line such as the below?

[('boost bailout fund, inject cash into banks and cut Greek debt')]

Answer 1

From the documentation:

If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group. Empty matches are included in the result unless they touch the beginning of another match.

— http://docs.python.org/library/re.html

If you want one match, do:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import re
text = 'Proposal will boost bailout fund, inject cash into banks and cut Greek debt says reports.'
pattern = re.compile(r'boost bailout[\s\S]*?debt')
print re.findall(pattern, text)