I have a text that has a lot of \n and | in it.
Here is a sample:
this is a sample\n text. This symbol | shows what I am talking about.
This is \n another | sample
I want to be able to extract everything that is between \n and |. For above example this is: text. This symbol as well as another
How can I do that in Python 2.7?
You can use:
s='this is a sample\n text. This symbol | shows what I am talking about.\nThis is \n another | sample'
>>> print re.findall(r'\n([^|\n]*)\|', s);
[' text. This symbol ', ' another ']
This regex captures literal \n followed by a negation pattern that says:
([^|\n]*) which means match 0 or more of any character that is NOT pipe or newline. Square brackets are used for capturing it in a group which will be printed later in findall output. It matches a literal | in the end.
Or else using lookaheads:
>>> print re.findall(r'(?<=\n )[^|\n]*(?= +\|)', s);
['text. This symbol', 'another']
(?<=\n ) is a lookbehind that means match should be preceded by newline and a space(?= +\|) is a lookahead that means match should be followed by a space and pipe.Use capturing group.
re.findall(r'\n([^|]*)\|', string)
[^|]* matches any character but not of a | symbol, zero or more times. By default re.findall prints the characters which are present inside the capturing group. So it prints out the in-between characters. | is a special meta character in regex which acts like an alternation operator. To match a literal | symbol, you must need to escape it in your regex.
\na literal character or newline character?