Question

I have an array of strings that I want to extract specific content from:

['link.description', 'button.text]] </li>']

I want to get the following output:

link.description
button.text

For each string in the array, I do the following:

str = re.findall('(.*?)\]+', str)

With the above regex, I can only get button.text. How would I get both link.description and button.text? I tried using:

str = re.findall('(.*?)\]*', str)

But the above just gives me a bunch of blanks in the return str.

Answer 1

You don’t need regex for a simple task like this. Besides, your code will probably make more sense without regex.

In this case, you can simply use str.split():

>>> thingies = ['link.description', 'button.text]] </li>']
>>> different_thingies = [thingy.split(']')[0] for thingy in thingies]
>>> different_thingies
['link.description', 'button.text']