Question

I’m a newbie to regular expressions and I have the following string:

sequence = '["{\"First\":\"Belyuen,NT,0801\",\"Second\":\"Belyuen,NT,0801\"}","{\"First\":\"Larrakeyah,NT,0801\",\"Second\":\"Larrakeyah,NT,0801\"}"]'

I am trying to extract the text Belyuen,NT,0801 and Larrakeyah,NT,0801 in python. I have the following code which is not working:

re.search('\:\\"...\\', ''.join(sequence))

I.e. I want to get the string between characters :\ and \.

Answer 1

Don’t use regex for this. It appears to be a rather strangely split set of JSON strings. Join them back together and use the json module to decode it.

import json
sequence = '[%s]' % ','.join(sequence)
data = json.loads(sequence)
print data[0]['First'], data[0]['Second']

(Note the json module is new in Python2.6 – if you have a lower version, download and install simplejson).