Question

In the following script I would like to pull out text between the double quotes (“). However, the python interpreter is not happy and I can’t figure out why…

import re

text = 'Hello, "find.me-_/\\" please help with python regex'
pattern = r'"([A-Za-z0-9_\./\\-]*)"'
m = re.match(pattern, text)

print m.group()

The output should be find.me-/\.

Answer 1

match starts searching from the beginning of the text.

Use search instead:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import re

text = 'Hello, "find.me-_/\\" please help with python regex'
pattern = r'"([A-Za-z0-9_\./\\-]*)"'
m = re.search(pattern, text)

print m.group()

match and search return None when they fail to match.

I guess you are getting AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group' from python: This is because you are assuming you will match without checking the return from re.match.