在单引号正则表达式和python之间提取短语

Question

I want to extract from text phrases which are usually between single quotation

def extract_phrase(s):
    list = []
    pattern = re.compile("(?<=')[^']+(?=')")
    for value in pattern.findall(s):
        list.append(value)
    return list

print(extract_phrase("I can't Sleep and 'black lives matter'"))
['t Sleep and ', 'black lives matter']

as you can see the code return 2 strings, which is not good because I want only the 'black lives matter' to return.

to fix it I tried to put \\b at the start and in the end of the regex expression but i did not recieve anything when i made that change.

so how can i change the regex statement so i will get all strings from text that start with ' and end with '.

thank you

Answer 1

If your single quotes are all balanced and unescaped then you may use this regex:

\B'.*?'(?!\w)

RegEx Demo

RegEx Details:

• \\B : Asserts position where \\b does not match
• ' matches the character '
• .*? : Matches 0 or more of any character
• (?!\\w) : Negative lookahead to assert that next character is not a word character