Question

I have an input text which can be either:

"URL: http://www.cnn.com Cookie: xxx; yyy"

or just:

"URL: http://www.cnn.com"

How do I capture both URL and cookie into two separate variables in Python? The part I don’t know how specify is the optional cookie.

Thanks.

Answer 1

str = 'URL: http://www.cnn.com Cookie: xxx; yyy'

match = re.search(r'URL: (\S+)( Cookie: (.*))?', str)
print match.group(1)
print match.group(3)

>>> http://www.cnn.com
>>> xxx; yyy