Question

When you use variables (is that the correct word?) in python regular expressions like this: “blah (?P\w+)” (“value” would be the variable), how could you make the variable’s value be the text after “blah ” to the end of the line or to a certain character not paying any attention to the actual content of the variable. For example, this is pseudo-code for what I want:

>>> import re
>>> p = re.compile("say (?P<value>continue_until_text_after_assignment_is_recognized) endsay")
>>> m = p.match("say Hello hi yo endsay")
>>> m.group('value')
'Hello hi yo'

Note: The title is probably not understandable. That is because I didn’t know how to say it. Sorry if I caused any confusion.

Answer 1

For that you’d want a regular expression of

"say (?P<value>.+) endsay"

The period matches any character, and the plus sign indicates that that should be repeated one or more times… so .+ means any sequence of one or more characters. When you put endsay at the end, the regular expression engine will make sure that whatever it matches does in fact end with that string.