Question

I’ve a string with a mysql structure dump.

...
/*!40111 SET @OLD_SQL_NOTES=@@SQL_NOTES, SQL_NOTES=0 */;

--
-- Table structure for table `contig`
--

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `contig`;
/*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client     = @@character_set_client */;
/*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */;
CREATE TABLE `contig` (
  `id` int(10) NOT NULL,
  `seq` varchar(1000) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
/*!40101 SET character_set_client = @saved_cs_c
..

Now I want to select each string wich contains a create table query.
I tried this with re.findall and with several regexes (E.g. (CREATE TABLE)(.*)[^;]*)

But each regex I tried returned at best [('CREATE TABLE', " 'contig' (")]. But I want the whole query as one element in the list. I tried rstrip to remove break lines, but nothing worked.

How can I get each INSERT INTO query as a whole?

Answer 1

You can not select nested parentheses sequence using regular expressions. So the task you want to perform is unsolvable.

But as a hack, you can try something like this:

>>> re.findall('CREATE TABLE[^;]+;', s)
['CREATE TABLE `contig` (...) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;']

Part (.*) is excess in your regex.