Question

I have a textfile that consists of multiple blocks such as one shown here :

TestVar 00000000  WWWWWW 222.222 222.222 222.222
UNKNOWN ,,,,,,,,  ,,,,,,  ,,,,,,

I would like to get the folowing output:
Each part is always 8 characters long (e.g TestVar , 00000000)
From each line that start with testvar i would like the code to return:

WWWWWW_00000000

Can someone help me with this I have used regex before but never with python and am quite new to both of them.

Thanks

Answer 1

With regex pattern ^TestVar\s+(\d{8})\s+(\S+) you can get that as >>

import re
p = re.compile('^TestVar\s+(\d{8})\s+(\S+)')
m = p.match('TestVar 00000000  WWWWWW 222.222 222.222 222.222')
if m:
    print 'Match found: ', m.group(2) + '_' + m.group(1)
else:
    print 'No match'

Test this demo here.

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To find all occurrences in multiline input string use:

p = re.compile("^TestVar\s+(\d{8})\s+(\S+)", re.MULTILINE) 
m = p.findall(input) 

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To learn more about regex with Python, see http://docs.python.org/howto/regex.html