Reading after a symbol..

[Jonas H.]

On 10/12/2010 10:48 PM, Pratik Khemka wrote:
> Likewise I want to read the number after the '#' and store it in num. The problem is that the number can be a 1/2/3/4 digit number. So is there a way in which I can define num so that it contains the number after '#' irrespective of how many digits the number is. Because the problem is that the above code will not work for scenarios when the number is  not 2 digits..

Easy with regular expressions:

 >>> re.search('(\d{2,4}})', 'foo123bar').group(1)
'123'

That regular expression basically means "match any sequence of 2 to 4 
digits (0-9)". Note that this would also match against a sequence that 
is not surrounded by non-digits (hence, a sequence that is longer than 4 
digits). You could work around that with something like this:

[^\d](\d{2,4})[^\d]

That's the expression used above but encapsulated with '[^\d]', which 
stands for "anything but a digit", so the complete expression now 
matches against "all sequence of 2 to 4 digits that is surrounded by 
non-digits". Note that this expression wouldn't match against a string 
that has no surrounding characters. So for example '1234' or '1234a' or 
'a1234' won't be matched, but 'a1234b' will be.

Hope this helps :-)

Jonas