I want to use regular expressions to get all the image files (.gif, .jpg, .png) that appear here. So the result from the text above should be:
['fancybox-x.png', 'fancybox-y.png', 'blank.gif']
What I did was:
re.findall('\w+\.(jpg|gif|png)', f.read())
So the pattern is:
1 or more word-characters (\w+) followed by a dot (\.) and then 'jpg', 'gif' or 'png' (jpg|gif|png) .
This actually works, but confuses the content of the parentheses (which I'm using only for "grouping") as a group(1) , so the result is:
['png', 'png', 'gif']
With is right, but incomplete. In other words, I'm asking, how can I make re.findall() distinguish between "grouping" parentheses and parentheses to assign groups?
python regex
asked Nov 23 '11 at 0:52
juliomalegria 11.8k 7 48 76
3 Answers
You're looking for non-capturing version of regular parentheses (?:...) . The description is available in the re module docs.
s ='''[22/Nov/2011 12:57:58] "GET /media/js/jquery-1.4.3.min.js HTTP/1.1" 304 0
for m in re.findall('([-\w]+\.(?:jpg|gif|png))', s):
print m
edited Nov 23 '11 at 1:04 answered Nov 23 '11 at 0:58
Andrew Walker 17.3k 6 43 74
yep! that was it, thank you @AndrewWalker! juliomalegria Nov 23 '11 at 1:08
I actually liked more your answer without the code.. made me feel like a newbie :-( juliomalegria Nov 23
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8236020/searching-images-files-with-regular-expressions 1/2 10/12/2017 python - Searching images files with regular expressions - Stack Overflow '11 at 1:09
You can just add another pair of parentheses, and put ?: for the inner one
re.findall('/([^/]+\.(?:jpg|gif|png))', f.read())
Note that \w won't match "-", so I would suggest [^/]+
answered Nov 23 '11 at 1:00
Chen Xing 917 1 7 9
you're right about the "-". What's the [^/]+ for? same as [\w-]+ ? juliomalegria Nov 23 '11 at 1:13
@julio.alegria , [^/] will match all characters other than "/". Chen Xing Nov 23 '11 at 1:40
If you're looking for the entire match you should be able to find it in group 0, otherwise you can add extra parentheses if you're looking for another part of the string.
answered Nov 23 '11 at 0:57
Godwin 5,969 3 22 46
2 re.findall() returs a list, so there's no group 0 juliomalegria Nov 23 '11 at 1:00
1 if you have multiple groups in your re, findall returns a list of tuples, so you could do ["".join(groups) for groups in re.findall('(\w+\.)(gif|png|jpg)', my_data)] -- note the new parenths around \w+\. -- accepted answer is obviously a better solution here but i can see this being potentially useful. ben author Nov 23 '11 at 1:14
