Question

Let’s say I have a string in the following form:
myString={"name", "age", "address", "contacts", "Email"}

I need to get all the items of myString into a list using python. Here’s what I did:

r = re.search("myString=\{\"(.+)\", $\}", line)

if r:
     items.append(r.group(1)) 
print(items)

Here line is the variable that holds the content of my text file.

What change do I have to make to my regex to get all the items in myString?

Answer 1

Looks like valid set notation so you could use the ast module to parse it instead:

import ast
mystr  = 'myString={"name", "age", "address", "contacts", "Email"}'

tree   = ast.parse(mystr)
name   = tree.body[0].targets[0].id
values = [val.s for val in tree.body[0].value.elts]

print name, values
# prints: myString ['name', 'age', 'address', 'contacts', 'Email']

EDIT: In light of the actual format of the input file, I would use a regex to parse out the block and then parse the block as above, or as bellow to just strip off the quotes:

import re
block_re = re.compile(r'v_dims=\{(.*?)\}', re.S)

with open("C:\XXXX\nemo\Test.mrk") as f:
    doc = f.read()

block = block_re.search(doc)
[s.strip().strip('"') for s in block.group(1).split(',')]

But probably the best way is to combine the two:

import ast
import re

with open("C:\XXXX\nemo\Test.mrk") as f:
    doc = f.read()

block_re = re.compile(r'v_dims=\{.*?\}', re.S)
tree     = ast.parse(block_re.search(doc).group(0))

print [val.s for val in tree.body[0].value.elts]
# ['name', 'age', 'address', 'contacts', 'Email']