Question

Inspired by a now-deleted question; given a regex with named groups, is there a method like findall which returns a list of dict with the named capturing groups instead of a list of tuple?

Given:

>>> import re
>>> text = "bob sue jon richard harry"
>>> pat = re.compile('(?P<name>[a-z]+)\s+(?P<name2>[a-z]+)')
>>> pat.findall(text)
[('bob', 'sue'), ('jon', 'richard')]

Should instead give:

[{'name': 'bob', 'name2': 'sue'}, {'name': 'jon', 'name2': 'richard'}]

Answer 1

Using Pattern.finditer() then Match.groupdict():

>>> import re
>>> s = "bob sue jon richard harry"
>>> r = re.compile('(?P<name>[a-z]+)\s+(?P<name2>[a-z]+)')
>>> [m.groupdict() for m in r.finditer(s)]
[{'name2': 'sue', 'name': 'bob'}, {'name2': 'richard', 'name': 'jon'}]