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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Name Groups

Posted by John Eleftheriou
John Eleftheriou
4,369 Points

Hmm, no .groups attitude. ‎(ﾉಥ益ಥ）ﾉ ┻━┻

I have been trying to solve this challenge for quite a while but can't seem to find a solution. Can I please get some help before I start flipping people instead of tables?

names.py 
import re

string = 'Perotto, Pier Giorgio'

names = re.match(r'''([-\w]+)
(,\s[-\w ]+)''', string)

3 Answers

Kenneth Love
STAFF
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

You use triple quotes and a newline, but didn't use re.VERBOSE in the flag. Which means that your pattern is looking for a literal newline in the string...which doesn't have a newline.

You'll also want to not include the comma and space in either group. It's not part of the valuable data.

Geoff Parsons
Geoff Parsons
11,679 Points
Geoff Parsons
Geoff Parsons
11,679 Points

Your regular expression is matching the comma and the space along with the last name. Move those to between the two groups and you should be fine.

names = re.match(r'([\w]+), ([\w\s]+)', string)

Also a nice way I've found to test python regular expressions is python-regex.com. There are some other sites that aren't language-specific out there too that even show highlighting within the content.