Question

Simple one here but I’m fairly new to Python.

I have a string like this:

this is page one of an article 
<!--pagebreak page two --> this is page two 
<!--pagebreak--> this is the third page 
<!--pagebreak page four --> last page
// newlines added for readability

I need to split the string using this regex: <!--pagebreak(*.?)--> – the idea is that sometimes the <!--pagebreak--> comments have a ‘title’ (which I use in my templates), other times they don’t.

I tried this:

re.split("<!--pagebreak*.?-->", str)

which returned only the items with ‘titles’ in the pagebreak (and didn’t split them correctly either). What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Change *.? into .*?:

re.split("<!--pagebreak.*?-->", str)

Your current regex accepts any number of literal k‘s, optionally followed by (any character).

Also, I would recommend using raw strings (r"...") for your regular expressions. It’s not necessary in this case, but it’s an easy way to spare yourself a few headaches.