Question

I have the text below :

text='apples and oranges apples and grapes apples and lemons'

and I want to use regular expressions to achieve something like below:

‘apples and oranges’

‘apples and lemons’

I tried this re.findall('apples and (oranges|lemons)',text) , but it doesn’t work.

Update: If the ‘oranges’ and ‘lemons’ were a list : new_list=['oranges','lemons'], how could I go to (?:’oranges’|’lemons’) without typing them again ?

Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

re.findall(): If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.

Try this:

re.findall('apples and (?:oranges|lemons)',text)

(?:...) is a non-capturing version of regular parentheses.