Question

I have a regular expression to find :ABC:`hello` pattern. This is the code.

format =r".*\:(.*)\:\`(.*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
m = patt.match(l.rstrip())
if m:
    ...

It works well when the pattern happens once in a line, but with an example “:tagbox:`Verilog` :tagbox:`Multiply` :tagbox:`VHDL`”. It finds only the last one.

How can I find all the three patterns?

EDIT

Based on Paul Z’s answer, I could get it working with this code

format = r"\:([^:]*)\:\`([^`]*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
for m in patt.finditer(l.rstrip()):
    tag, value = m.groups()  
    print tag, ":::", value

Result

tagbox ::: Verilog
tagbox ::: Multiply
tagbox ::: VHDL

Answer 1

Yeah, dcrosta suggested looking at the re module docs, which is probably a good idea, but I’m betting you actually wanted the finditer function. Try this:

format = r"\:(.*)\:\`(.*)\`"
patt = re.compile(format, re.I|re.U)
for m in patt.finditer(l.rstrip()):
    tag, value = m.groups()
    ....

Your current solution always finds the last one because the initial .* eats as much as it can while still leaving a valid match (the last one). Incidentally this is also probably making your program incredibly slower than it needs to be, because .* first tries to eat the entire string, then backs up character by character as the remaining expression tells it “that was too much, go back”. Using finditer should be much more performant.