Python Regular Expression to find the last occurrence of whitespace in a certain pattern

Question

I am using Regular expression in Python. I want to find the string before last occurrence of whitespace in a certain pattern. For example In the following text, I want to find "Street". "On Monday , a worker at a [LOC Te Rapa Tika Street ]".

Can anyone help me to find the string using regular expression?

Thanks

Answer 1

Split the string on spaces and get the second last element:

>>> strs = "On Monday , a worker at a [LOC Te Rapa Tika Street ]"
>>> strs.split()[-2]
'Street'

Answer 2

re.split by \\s+ and take the second last token in the returned list (eg using index -2 ).

http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#re.split

Answer 3

>>>  import re
>>>  match = re.search('\[\s?LOC.+\s(\w+)\s?\]', "[LOC Te Rapa Tika Street ]")
>>>  match.group(1)
'Street'

This should work regardless of the spacing on the brackets.

Edit: After reading your comment, this would work better

   >>>  import re
   >>>  sentence = "A man strolling through the [LOC Pullman Hotel ] in [LOC Waterloo Quadrant ] on Sunday with the bag across his shoulder"
   >>>  match = re.findall('\[\s?LOC[^\]]+\s(\w+)\s?\]', sentence)
   >>>  match
   ['Hotel', 'Quadrant']