Question

I am trying to capture / extract numeric values from some strings.

Here is a sample string:

s='The shipping company had 93,999,888.5685 gallons of fuel on hand'

I want to pull the 93,999,888.5685 value
I have gotten my regex to this

> mine=re.compile("(\d{1,3}([,\d{3}])*[.\d+]*)")

However, when I do a findall I get the following:

mine.findall(s)

[('93,999,888.5685', '8')]

I have tried a number of different strategies to keep it from matching on the 8

But I am now realizing that I am not sure I know why it matched on the 8

Any illumination would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The reason the 8 is being captured is because you have 2 capturing groups. Mark the 2nd group as a non-capturing group using ?: with this pattern: (\d{1,3}(?:[,\d{3}])*[.\d+]*)

Your second group, ([,\d{3}]) is responsible for the additional match.