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Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 PointsMatching ', Tim'
It took me a while and a lot of playing with lookbehind assertions before I figured out that if you want to also match ', Tim' in the address book, you just need to remove the first \b (word boundary).
i.e.
print(re.findall(r'''
[-\w]*, # Find a word boundary, 1+ hyphens or characters, and a comma
\s # Find 1 whitespace
[-\w ]+ # 1+ hyphens and characters and explicit spaces
[^\t\n] # Ignore tabs and newlines
''', data, re.X))
2 Answers
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 PointsAnd now that I've progressed through the Groups step and learnt about the multiline flag (re.M), I've realised that the following will return only the names, not the jobs/companies:
print(re.findall(r'''
^[-\w]*, # Find 1+ hyphens or characters, and a comma
\s # Find 1 whitespace
[-\w ]+ # 1+ hyphens and characters and explicit spaces
[^\t\n] # Ignore tabs and newlines
''', data, re.X|re.M))
Note the caret (^) at the start of the expression to only match from the start of each line.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherSomeone likes regular expressions!
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 PointsYeah, they are very handy. I also love that they're in just about every good programming/scripting language out there, with relatively minor differences in syntax.
The Regular-Expressions.info site has been an excellent resource.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherOh, yeah, I know :) We match him later.
Iain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 PointsIain Simmons
Treehouse Moderator 32,305 PointsIn case you were wondering, Kenneth Love