Question

Say I have the following text:

*<string1>*<string2>*<string3>*

where * indicates any text except things surrounded by <>.

I would like to be able to capture string1 (the first occurrence of text wrapped by the characters <>).

I have tried using:

r = re.compile('.*<(.*?)>.*(<.*?>)*.*')
r.search(my_text)
match = m.group(1)

but it didn’t work.

I have no problem capturing string1 with a simpler regular expression if the text has only one occurrence of strings surrounded by <> with:

r = re.compile('.*<.*?>.*')

But I can’t identify the correct regexp when the text has multiple regular expressions. I am not sure I am understanding the role of () and ? for this problem correctly.

How would you capture the first string1 in the top example above?

Answer 1

This should do it

re.search("<([^>]*)", the_string).group(1)