I'm a bit confused about extracting data using re.search or re.findall. Say I have the following code: tuples = re.findall(r'blahblah(\d+)yattayattayatta(\w+)moreblahblahblah(\w+)over', text)
So I'm looking for that string in 'text', and I intend to extract the parts which have parentheses around them. And it works: the variable "tuples", which I assigned to get the return of re.findall, returns a tuple list, each 'element' therein being a tuple of 3 elements (which is what I wanted since I had 3 sets of parentheses). My question is how does Python know to return just the part in the parentheses and not to return the "blahblah" and the "yattayattayatta", etc...? The 're.search' function returns the whole thing, and if I want just the parentheses parts, I do tuples.group(1) or tuples.group(2) or tuples.group(3), depending on which set of parentheses I want. Does the re.findall command by default ignore anything outside of the parentheses and only return the parentheses as a grouping withing one tuple (i.e., the first element in "tuples" would be, as it is, a list comprised of 3 elements corresponding respectively to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd parentheses)? Thank you for reading. -Alex
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