Retrieve sections from string using regular expressions in python

Question

I have strings like "members[value eq\"2819c223-7f76-453a-919d-413861904646\"].displayName", where i was trying to retrieve members, string in bracket, and displayname.

I tried this, matchObj = re.match( r"(.*)\[([.*]+)\?](.*?)", line, re.M|re.I) where string in bracket and last string(after .) are optional (this part "[value eq\"2819c223-7f76-453a-919d-413861904646\"].displayName").

What am I doing wrong here?

need more example and description, anyways, does `re.search(r"(\w+)(?:\[[^]]*\])?(?:\.\w+)?", line)[0]` work? — Sundeep, Aug 16 '20 at 06:06
```re.search(r"(\w+)(\[[^]]*\])?(\.\w+)?", line)```, this worked — Mohan, Aug 16 '20 at 06:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 16 '20 at 06:35

(\w+)(\[[^]]*\])?(\.\w+)?

\w will match any word character (alphabets, numbers and underscore)
- use [a-zA-Z] to match only alphabets, [a-zA-Z\d] to match digits as well
\[[^]]*\] will match [ followed by non ] characters followed by ]
- (\[[^]]*\])? makes it optional for this entire pattern
\.\w+ will match . and word characters

If you use (.*) instead of (\w+) the greediness of .* will make it to match everything as the next two are optional. See also: Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers

Retrieve sections from string using regular expressions in python

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