On Apr 19, 2:48 am, Jussi Piitulainen <jpiit...@ling.helsinki.fi> wrote: > Sania writes: > > So I am trying to get the number of casualties in a text. After 'death > > toll' in the text the number I need is presented as you can see from > > the variable called text. Here is my code > > I'm pretty sure my regex is correct, I think it's the group part > > that's the problem. > > I am using nltk by python. Group grabs the string in parenthesis and > > stores it in deadnum and I make deadnum into a list. > > > text="accounts put the death toll at 637 and those missing at > > 653 , but the total number is likely to be much bigger" > > dead=re.match(r".*death toll.*(\d[,\d\.]*)", text) > > deadnum=dead.group(1) > > deaths.append(deadnum) > > print deaths > > It's the regexp. The .* after "death toll" each the input as far as it > can without making the whole match fail. The group matches only the > last digit in the text. > > You could allow only non-digits before the number. Or you could look > up the variant of * that only matches as much as it must.
Hey Thanks, So now my regex is dead=re.match(r".*death toll.{0,20}(\d[,\d\.]*)", text) But I only find 7 not 657. How is it that the group is only matching the last digit? The whole thing is parenthesis not just the last part. ? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list