Question

I have a Python regular expression that contains a group which can occur zero or many times – but when I retrieve the list of groups afterwards, only the last one is present. Example:

re.search('(\w)*', 'abcdefg').groups()

this returns the list (‘g’,)

I need it to return (‘a’,’b’,’c’,’d’,’e’,’f’,’g’,)

Is that possible? How can I do it?

Answer 1

In addition to Douglas Leeder’s solution, here is the explanation:

In regular expressions the group count is fixed. Placing a quantifier behind a group does not increase group count (imagine all other group indexes increment because an eralier group matched more than once).

Groups with quantifiers are the way of making a complex sub-expression atomic, when there is need to match it more than once. The regex engine has no other way than saving the last match only to the group. In short: There is no way to achieve what you want with a single ‘unarmed’ regular expression, and you have to find another way.