Print string if between "-" and "-"

1
votes

I have a text file which has multiple strings between '-', and i'm trying to print every string that is between '-'

I have tried this code but, it's skipping values.

import re

text=   """
        -text1-text2-text3
        -text4-
        """

result = re.findall(r'-(.*?)-', text)
print(result,end="")

I'm trying to get the result to come up like this:

['text1','text2','text3'],'text4']

but instead my code is skipping values and giving me this:

['text1','text4']

2
pythonregex
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2 Answers

0
votes

You may use

-\s*(.*?)(?=\s*-)

See the regex demo and the regex graph:

enter image description here

See the Python demo:

import re
text=   """
        -text1-text2-text3
        -text4-
        """
result = re.findall(r'-\s*(.*?)(?=\s*-)', text)
print(result) # => ['text1', 'text2', 'text3', 'text4']

If you need to match across lines, add the re.S or re.DOTALL flag to re.findall.

Regex details

  • - - a hyphen
  • \s* - 0+ whitespaces
  • (.*?) - Capturing group 1: any 0+ chars other than line break chars
  • (?=\s*-) - a positive lookahead that requires 0+ whitespaces and then - immediately to the right of the current location
0
votes

Try this simple regex r'(?<=-)[^-]*(?=-)'

>>> import re
>>> text=   """
...         -text1-text2-text3
...         -text4-
...         """
>>> print ([x.strip() for x in re.findall(r'(?<=-)[^-]*(?=-)', text)])
['text1', 'text2', 'text3', 'text4']