Question

So, I’m still a newbie with regex and python. I’ve been searching for some time but don’t know how to ask what I’m looking for.

I need to get data from a formatted string into a list of lists, or dictionary.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Frank         114      0         0         0          0         114       
Joe           49       1         0         0          0         50        
Bob           37       0         0         0          0         37        
Sally         34       2         0         0          0         36     

This is the output of a script. Currently I have:

match_list = []
match = re.search('\n(\w+)\s+(\d*)\s+(\d*)', output)
  if match:
    match_list.append([match.group(1),
                       match.group(2),
                       match.group(3)])
>>>print match_list
[['frank', '114', '0']]

This is perfect, except that I need to have match_list return:

[['frank', '114', '0'],
 ['Joe', '49', '1'],
 ['Bob', '37', '0'],
 ['Sally', '34', '2']]

My initial thought was to for loop, and check if the match.group(1) was already listed, and if so move to the next, but then I realized I didn’t know how to do that. But there you have it. I am having a hard time figuring this out. Any help would be fantastic! 🙂

Oh also. The list size changes. Sometimes there may only be one user, other times there may be 20 users. So I can just set up a giant static regex. (that I know of…)

Answer 1

You can use re.findall:

match_list = []
match = re.findall('\n(\w+)\s+(\d*)\s+(\d*)', output)
for k in match:
    #k will be a tuple like this: ('frank', '114', '0')
    match_list.append(list(k))

or
Same solution as an oneliner:

match_list = map(list, re.findall('\n(\w+)\s+(\d*)\s+(\d*)', output))