Question

I’m trying to match pair of digits in a string and capture them in groups, however i seem to be only able to capture the last group.

Regex:
(\d\d){1,3}

Input String: 123456 789101

Match 1: 123456
Group 1: 56

Match 2: 789101
Group 1: 01

What I want is to capture all the groups like this:
Match 1: 123456
Group 1: 12
Group 2: 34
Group 3: 56

* Update
It looks like Python does not let you capture multiple groups, for example in .NET you could capture all the groups in a single pass, hence re.findall(‘\d\d’, ‘123456’) does the job.

Answer 1

You cannot do that using just a single regular expression. It is a special case of counting, which you cannot do with just a regex pattern. \d\d will get you:

Group1: 12
Group2: 23
Group3: 34
…

regex library in python comes with a non-overlapping routine namely re.findall() that does the trick. as in:

     re.findall('\d\d', '123456')

will return ['12', '34', '56']