Question

I am trying to match a string with a regular expression and only one of the two cases are working

String

ABCD 123 - Abcdef 0000
ABCD 123/DEFG123 - Abcdef 0000

RegEx

[A-Z]+ [A-Z0-9]{2,20} - [A-Z][a-z]+ [0-9]{4}

This matches the 1st one and Im trying to match it to both and this is the new expression I tried

[A-Z]+ [A-Z0-9\\/]{2,20} - [A-Z][a-z]+ [0-9]{4}

This matches DEFG123 - Abcdef 0000 out of the entire ABCD 123/DEFG123 - Abcdef 0000 but I am trying to get the entire string out of this. This is the code I’m using

regex = re.compile(expression)
r = regex.search(string)

Answer 1

The escape is what’s wrong. Taken out:

string_one = 'ABCD 123 - Abcdef 0000'
string_two = 'ABCD 123/DEFG123 - Abcdef 0000'
pattern = r'[A-Z]+ [A-Z0-9/]{2,20} - [A-Z][a-z]+ [0-9]{4}'
regex = re.compile(pattern)
if regex.search(string_one):
    print "string one matches!"
if regex.search(string_two):
    print "string two matches!"

# output:
string one matches!
string two matches!

Note that my use of a raw string ( r'this is a raw string' ) is unnecessarily, but I obsessively use raw strings for patterns because they prevent most backslash interpolation.