Question

my_string = "Value1=Product Registered;Value2=Linux;Value3=C:5;C++:5;Value4=43;"

I was using the following regex:

tokens = re.findall(r'([^;]+)=([^;]+)', line, re.I)

I need to parse value1, value2, etc and put their values into the database. For example, I need to store "C:5;C++:5" for value3 — but by using the above regex I can only store C:5, because I parse based on ";". What would be a better way to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It seems reasonable to assume that the key names don’t contain semicolons. If this isn’t true, then as Philipp pointed out the language is ambiguous. But if not, you can use a lookahead to tell which ; is the separator: it has to be followed by a sequence of things that aren’t either ; or =, and then either an = or end-of-string:

>>> my_string = "Value1=Product Registered;Value2=Linux;Value3=C:5;C++:5;Value4=43;"
>>> r = re.compile(r'([^;]+)=([^=]+);(?=[^;=]*(?:=|$))')
>>> r.findall(my_string)
[('Value1', 'Product Registered'),
 ('Value2', 'Linux'),
 ('Value3', 'C:5;C++:5'),
 ('Value4', '43')]