python regex pattern to extract value between two characters

Question

I am trying to extract an id number from urls in the form of

http://www.domain.com/some-slug-here/person/237570
http://www.domain.com/person/237570

either one of these urls could also have params on them

http://www.domain.com/some-slug-here/person/237570?q=some+search+string
http://www.domain.com/person/237570?q=some+search+string

I have tried the following expressions to capture the id value of '237570' from the above urls but each one kinda works but does work across all four url scenarios.

(?<=person\/)(.*)(?=\?)
(?<=person\/)(.*)(?=\?|\z)
(?<=person\/)(.*)(?=\??*)

what I am seeing happening is it is getting the 237570 but including the ? and characters that come after it in the url. how can I say stop capturing either when you hit a ?, /, or the end of the string?

thanks d3t0n4t0 and m.buettner - i should've included that the ids can be alphanumeric such as /person/35004902B839ABA2 I changed the (.*) to (\w{1,}) and it works great! — John L
– John L, Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 1:43

d3t0n4t0r · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-04 00:32:48Z

2

String:

http://www.domain.com/some-slug-here/person/1234?q=some+search+string
http://www.domain.com/person/3456?q=some+search+string
http://www.domain.com/some-slug-here/person/5678
http://www.domain.com/person/7890

Regexp:

person\/(\d{1,})

Output:

>>> regex.findall(string)
[u'1234', u'3456', u'5678', u'7890']

answered Oct 4, 2012 at 0:32

d3t0n4t0r

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Comments

Martin Ender · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-03 23:54:18Z

1

Don't use .* to match the ID. . will match any character (except for line breaks, unless you use the DOTALL option). Just match a bunch of digits: (.*) --> (\d+)

answered Oct 3, 2012 at 23:54

Martin Ender

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3 Comments

inhan Over a year ago

..or the greedy, perhaps: (.*?)

Martin Ender Over a year ago

yes, that should work, too. but I find it not really elegant to match a number with .*. One should keep the regex as constrained as possible to avoid unexpected special cases. Of course, you could still add the ungreedy ? to the digit-version, but it's not necessary any more.

inhan Over a year ago

Agreed. I was just thinking wider, ignoring the numeric requirement. Thanks for the correction btw. I don't know why I wrote greedy instead of ungreedy :)

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