Question

I have a log file that appends new logs as the program runs on different days. Each iteration there will be a new Product Version and Launch Switch. I need the Product Version: [0-9-]*and Launch Switch: \w* from each iteration as a tuple.

Currently I am doing this:

ver = re.findall(r'(?<=Product Version: )[0-9.]*', s)

launch = re.findall(r'(?<=Launch Switch: )\w*', s)

Then later I’m iterating through ver and launch to create the tuples. It works, but it’s not pretty and I’m sure there’s a more Pythonic way of doing this.

Answer 1

You can use multiple capturing groups within your regex pattern; re.findall will then return them as a tuple. For example:

>>> data = "Product Version: 0.0.1 | Launch Switch: hello | Product Version: 2.3.4 | Launch Switch: world"
>>> re.findall("Product Version: ([0-9.]+).*?Launch Switch: (\w+)", data)
[('0.0.1', 'hello'), ('2.3.4', 'world')]

From the re.findall docs:

Return all non-overlapping matches of pattern in string, as a list of strings. The string is scanned left-to-right, and matches are returned in the order found. If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group. Empty matches are included in the result unless they touch the beginning of another match.