find small occurences of a substring in a string

Question

I'm trying to parse some mathematical expressions with re (parenthesis content).

I've tried this :

>>> re.compile("\(.*\)").findall("(1 + 2) + (3 + 4)")
['(1 + 2) + (3 + 4)']

But I find only the biggest occurence, that include the content between the last and first parenthesis. But I would like to get only the smallest.

How could I achieve this?

>>> re.compile(<expr>).findall("(1 + 2) + (3 + 4)")
['(1 + 2)', '(3 + 4')]

I've tried to replace <expr> with "\\((?![\\(\\)])+\\)" (to exclude occurences with parenthesis within parenthesis) but it doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

Instead of matching everything with .* , exclude from that match the closing parentheses character:

>>> re.compile("\([^)]*\)").findall("(1 + 2) + (3 + 4)")
['(1 + 2)', '(3 + 4)']

See I am using

[^)]*

instead of

.*