How to exclude a substring in a regular expression?

Question

There is a line of text:

Lorem ~Ipsum~ is simply ~dummy~ text ~of~ the printing...

To find all the words enclosed in ~~ I use

re.search(r'~([^~]*)~', text)

Let's say it became necessary to use ~~ instead of ~ ([^\~]+) indicates to exclude the ~ character from the text within those characters How do I make a regular expression to exclude a string of characters instead of just one?

That is, ~~Lor~em~~ should return Lor~em

The symbol of the new string must not be excluded and the length of the found string cannot be 0

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-12T23:21:25.583

1

Use a non-greedy quantifier instead of a negated character set.

re.search(r'~~(.*?)~~', text, flags=re.DOTALL)

re.DOTALL makes . match newline characters.

edited Sep 12 '22 at 23:21

answered Sep 12 '22 at 23:09

Barmar

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Updated the answer. – Barmar Sep 12 '22 at 23:16
Unfortunately, I cannot exclude the newline character – Aem Aem Sep 12 '22 at 23:17
I said I updated the answer. `re.DOTALL` includes the newline. – Barmar Sep 12 '22 at 23:20

How to exclude a substring in a regular expression?

1 Answers1