正则表达式 - 排除中间模式

Question

I'm struggling with excluding or ignoring a certain pattern.

In excel there are many timestamps followed by an ID

ie

[0:02:25] 10652A

sometimes there is a mistake where it is mixed up like this

1 [0:03:23] 0652A

Here the 1 belongs to 0652A , so it should be 10652A.....

How can I complete my code so that these mistakes (the middle timestamp part) can be ignored to match the id correctly?

This is what I've got so far:

starting_digits = re.search(r"^(\d+)", prefix)
id_code = re.search(r"(\d{2,4}.{1,3}):", prefix).group(1)

Thank you in advance !

Answer 1

Here is the solution for remove all text between square brackets.

\[.*\]

Answer 2

Use:

# prefix = "1 [0:03:23] 0652A"
mobj = re.search(r"(\w+)?\s*\[(.*)\]\s*(\w+)", prefix)

id_code = mobj.group(1) + mobj.group(3) if mobj.group(1) else mobj.group(3)
timestamp = mobj.group(2)

print(id_code, timestamp)

This prints:

10652A 0:02:25

You can test the regular expression here .

Answer 3

Instead of finding the content of the ID, you can simply erase the timestamp part which matches \s*\[[\d:]+\]\s*

• any amount of space
• left square bracket
• more than one digits/:
• right square bracket
• any amount of space

reg = r"\s*\[.*\]\s*"

prefix = "[0:03:23] 0652A"
print(re.sub(reg, "", prefix))  # 0652A

prefix = "1 [0:03:23] 0652A"
print(re.sub(reg, "", prefix))  # 10652A