Welcome to the Treehouse Community

The Treehouse Community is a meeting place for developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels to get support. Collaborate here on code errors or bugs that you need feedback on, or asking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project. Join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today. (Note: Only Treehouse students can comment or ask questions, but non-students are welcome to browse our conversations.)

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and a supportive community. Start your free trial today.

Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Email Groups

Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points
Posted by Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

Any help?

emails.py 
import re

string = '''Love, Kenneth, kenneth+challenge@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5555, @kennethlove
Chalkley, Andrew, andrew@teamtreehouse.co.uk, 555-555-5556, @chalkers
McFarland, Dave, dave.mcfarland@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5557, @davemcfarland
Kesten, Joy, joy@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5558, @joykesten'''

contacts = re.search(r'''
^(?P<email>[-\w\d+.]+@[-\w.]+)
(?P<phone>\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}+)$
''', string, re.M |re.X | re.I)

2 Answers

Chris Freeman
MOD
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,082 Points
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,082 Points

You are very close.

  • remove the start of line anchor ^, and the end of line anchor $. These say the pattern match must include those end points. Since the target is within the line. This fails to match
  • remove the + following the {4}. This is seen as a double modifier “one or more multiples of 4”
  • you are missing pattern characters to consume the comma and space \s between the two targeted fields.

Post back if you need more help. Good luck!!!

Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points
Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points 
contacts = re.search(r'''
(?P<email>[\w\d.+]+@[\w.]+)
[^,\s\t]+
(?P<phone>[\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}])
''', string, re.X |re.M)

I keep encountering an error "bad character range }-\d"

Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,082 Points
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,082 Points

Two issues

  • remove square brackets from the phone number pattern. Characters between square brackets are considered a character set. If a hyphen is used anywhere but the first character in a character set, it is assumed to be defining a range of characters. Both the } and the \d are not legal as a start or end of a character range.
  • remove the caret ^ from the character range used to catch the comma and space.

Post back if you need more help. Good luck!!!

Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points
Maba Bah
Maba Bah
2,744 Points

Splendid! Thank you so much! Looks like I might have to revise some previous regex videos