Question

I’m writing a program in python which will deal with user input for football scores. for example:
Newcastle United 4 - 6 Manchester united

above score can also be written as

NUFC 4-6 MUFC and also as newcastle 4-6 manu and so on……

my purpose is to extract the team names and the score:
Newcastle United,4,6,Manchester United.

I need suggestions on how this can be done. One way i could think of is Regular expression but i’m not well versed with regex, so i am seeking help here.
thanks

Answer 1

In general, it looks like a score could be described as a list of 5 items:

1. arbitrary text
2. a string of digits
3. a hyphen
4. a string of digits
5. arbitrary text

and that there may or may not be a space on either side of the hyphen.

The following should work:

g = re.match("(.*) ([0-9]+) ?- ?([0-9]+) (.*)", user_input)
if g:
    team1 = g.group(1)
    team1_score = g.group(2)
    team2_score = g.group(3)
    team2 = g.group(4)

The numbers in the call to group() correspond to the parentheses in the regular expression, from left to right.