On Thursday, 12 December 2019 02:28:09 UTC+8, Ben Bacarisse wrote: > A S <aishan0...@gmail.com> writes: > > > I would like to extract all words within specific keywords in a .txt > > file. For the keywords, there is a starting keyword of "PROC SQL;" (I > > need this to be case insensitive) and the ending keyword could be > > either "RUN;", "quit;" or "QUIT;". This is my sample .txt file. > > > > Thus far, this is my code: > > > > with open('lan sample text file1.txt') as file: > > text = file.read() > > regex = re.compile(r'(PROC SQL;|proc sql;(.*?)RUN;|quit;|QUIT;)') > > k = regex.findall(text) > > print(k) > > Try > > re.compile(r'(?si)(PROC SQL;.*(?:QUIT|RUN);)') > > Read up one what (?si) means and what (?:...) means.. You can do the > same by passing flags to the compile method. > > > Output: > > > > [('quit;', ''), ('quit;', ''), ('PROC SQL;', '')] > > Your main issue is that | binds weakly. Your whole pattern tries to > match any one of just four short sub-patterns: > > PROC SQL; > proc sql;(.*?)RUN; > quit; > QUIT; > > -- > Ben.
Hey Ben, this works for my sample .txt file! Thanks:) but it wont work, if I have other multiple text files to parse through that, are similar but have some variations, strangely enough. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list