Question

I have a file formatted like this:

hello = {

     a = "2354a"
     b = "06567567h"


}

goodbye = {
     there = "/home/afhge"

}

...

anotherset = {
      dsfsdf = grhbrwecs
      dfgtmyj = 12345

}

I am using regular expressions in python, what I want matched is everything inside the braces so the resulting match output would be the following list:

['\n\n\ta = "2345a"\n\tb = "06567567h"\n\n\n', '\n\there = "/home/afhge"\n\n', '\n\tdsfsdf = grhbrwecs\n\tdfgtmyj = 12345\n\n']

I have tried the regex:

desired_output = re.findall("{[^}]", file_text)

however this regex results in the list:

['{\n', '{\n', '{\n', '{\n', '{\n']

It looks like [^}] matches any character up until a newline. I’ve tried doing:

desired_output = re.findall("{[^}]", file_text, re.S)

and

desired_output  = re.findall("{[^}]", file_text, re.M)

To no success :(.

Thanks!

Answer 1

No your character class is right. It will match any character that is not } (even line breaks). The problem is that [^}] matches only one character. Simply use a repetition quantifier (and you should probably escape the {):

r"\{[^}]*"

Regarding the options you tried. If anything re.S would help, because without it . does not match line breaks. But the . is really the only thing affected by re.S. The other option re.M has nothing to with it. That just makes the anchors ^ and $ match at line beginnings and ends as well.

Also, since you only want the content within the brackets, you don’t need to match the { itself, but you could use a lookbehind instead:

r"(?<=\{)[^}]*"

This will not include the { in the match.