[Chicago] Basic Regex Question

[Michael Urman]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:23, Chris McAvoy <chris.mcavoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have the following regex:
> album_regex = re.compile(r'(?P<artist>.*)\s-\s(?P<album>.*)\((?P<label>.*)\)')

Perhaps adjust the middle part to (?P<album>.*?) to make it non-greedy.

> I get the feeling that there's a simple switch to say "get the first
> and last parens", but I'm having trouble with it, as I'm impatient,
> and not so hot at regex's.

Nope there's not; that's not how regexs work. However this case is
simple enough it just might be doable. Instead of each part grabbing
as much as possible such that later parts match, you can make some
parts grab as little as possible such that later parts match.

-- 
Michael Urman