Question

I am trying to extract a portion from a string in python 2.7 using a regular expression (re module).

The best I can get is

res = "{{PakBusPort_somename} 11942 pakbus-port 1}\r\n{{Somename} 5436 CR800-series 2}"
p = re.compile('PakBusPort_')
m = p.findall( res )

Which will give me “PakBusPort_”. But I also need it to give me the “somename” portion.

Basically I need everything in between { and } that starts with “PakBusPort_”. I have tried

p = re.compile('PakBusPort_.*}}')

But no results.

I am a bit of a noob with regular expressions so any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In [71]: p = re.compile(r'{PakBusPort_(.*?)}')

In [72]: p.findall(res)
Out[72]: ['somename']

If you also need to include PakBusPort_, move the opening parenthesis:

In [73]: p = re.compile(r'{(PakBusPort_.*?)}')

In [74]: p.findall(res)
Out[74]: ['PakBusPort_somename']

The question mark is needed to make the match non-greedy, meaning that it’ll stop at the first } rather than matching everything till the last one.