Question

I am trying to write a regular expression which would match any occurrence of ABC following XYZ anywhere in the string :

Ex. text – “Some ABC text followed by XYZ followed by multiple ABC, more ABC, more ABC”

i.e., the regex should match three ABC’s coming after XYZ.

Any clues?

Answer 1

You could take an iterative approach:

s = "Some ABC text followed by XYZ followed by multiple ABC, more ABC, more ABC"

pattern = re.compile(r'(?<=XYZ)(.*?)ABC')
while pattern.search(s):
   s = pattern.sub(r'\1REPLACED', s)

print s

Output:

Some ABC text followed by XYZ followed by multiple REPLACED, more
REPLACED, more REPLACED