Question

I have a document that looks like the following:

{{ link.description | default text }}
{{ link.description |default text}}

As you can see, it might or might not have spaces around “default text”. I want to extract the text “default text” using python’s re library with this code:

default = re.findall('|[ ]*(.*?)[ ]*}}', doc)

Unfortunately, I do not get the desired results with the above regular expression. I am trying to capture “default text” using (.*?), but it does not seem to be working.

Answer 1

>>> st = '{{ link.description | default text }}'
>>> re.findall(r'\|\s*(.*?)\s*}',st)
['default text']
>>> st1  = '{{ link.description | default text }}'
>>> re.findall(r'\|\s*(.*?)\s*}',st1)
['default text']
>>>

In your regex |[ ]*(.*?)[ ]*}}.

1) You need to escape |.

2) Use \s* for white-space occurence.