Python regex match escaped char

Question

I need to match groups like:

:data:
:abc'e12\:3\:text:

in a string, meaning

:(?P<data>.*?):

but to also allow escaped colon \\:

My best try looks like this:

:(?P<data>((?<=\\):|.)*?):

Answer 1

p = re.compile(r':((\\:|[^:])+):')
print p.match(":abc'e12\:3\:text:").group(0)

Answer 2

You can always make sure you are getting the start and end characters with "^" and "$":

^:(.+):$

You can substitute ".+" with the type of regex you want too.