regex match optional part

Question

I have a string that shows how much time is left:

text = """                9d 15h left <br />
                           some other text not important
                           12h 5m left <br />""" 
pattern = "((\d+)d)?.*left <br />"

I'd like to match the number of days, or 9. However, if that's missing, I'd like to match an empty string. This is what I get

>>> re.findall(pattern,text)
[('', ''),('', '')]

But what I'm looking for is

>>> re.findall(pattern,text)
[('9d', '9'),('', '')]

astreal · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-01 13:43:23Z

1

you are missing the spaces in the pattern:

either:

re.search(r"[ ]+((\d+)d)?.*left <br />", text).groups()

or strip the text before

re.search(r"((\d+)d)?.*left <br />", text.strip()).groups()

answered Jun 1, 2013 at 13:43

astreal

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