Question

I am stuck in a dump:

import re
print re.search('return[^$]+',
                'return to the Treasury of $40 million\nnow!').group(0)

The above regex only prints return to the Treasury of, but I expected it to include $40 million. What I understand from regex is that I am asking it to take every thing until the end of the line.

I do not want to use .*, I want endline delimiter to go until the end of line from some point. If I remove $ from search string it prints the full string. Why is endline delimiter matching with dollar sign??

Answer 1

return[^$]+

will match a string “return” followed by any character that is not ‘$’ one or more times.

This is because [ ] mean character group and inside [ ] the special characters are threaded as simple characters.

Thus it matches only until the the dollar sign.

Why not use:

return.+$

this is exactly what you want.