Question

I’m using re.findall() to extract some version numbers from an HTML file:

>>> import re >>> text = '<table><td><a href=\'url\'>Test0.2.1.zip</a></td><td>Test0.2.1</td></table> Test0.2.1' >>> re.findall('Test([\.0-9]*)', text) ['0.2.1.', '0.2.1', '0.2.1'] 

but I would like to only get the ones that do not end in a dot. The filename might not always be .zip so I can’t just stick .zip in the regex.

I wanna end up with:

['0.2.1', '0.2.1'] 

Can anyone suggest a better regex to use? 🙂

Answer 1

re.findall(r'Test([0-9.]*[0-9]+)', text) 

or, a bit shorter:

re.findall(r'Test([\d.]*\d+)', text) 

By the way – you do not need to escape the dot in a character class. Inside [] the . has no special meaning, it just matches a literal dot. Escaping it has no effect.