Why is non-greedy Python Regex not non-greedy enough?

Question

I've implemented non-greedy regex on a group of string URLs, where I'm trying to clean them up so that they end after the .com (.co.uk etc). Some of them continued with ' or " or < after the desired cutoff, and so I used x = re.findall('([A-Za-z0-9]+@\\S+.co\\S*?)[\\'"<]', finalSoup2) .

The problem is that some URLs are misc@misc.misc'misc''misc' (or similar with < >) and so after implementing the non-greedy regex I'm still left with enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au">enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au , for example.

I've tried two ?? 's together, but obviously not working, so what's they proper way to acheive clean URLs in this situation?

Answer 1

The issue with your regex is that you currently are only looking for Non-spaces(period)co instead of looking for Non-spaces(period)Non-spaces.

So in this case you could get away with the following regex based on the information above.

>>> finalSoup2 = """
... misc@misc.misc'misc''misc
... enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au">enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au
... google.com
... google.co.uk"'<>Stuff
... """
>>>x = re.findall('([A-Za-z0-9]+@[^\'"<>]+)[\'"<]', finalSoup2)
>>>x
['misc@misc.misc',
 'enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au',
 'enquiries@smart-traffic.com.au\ngoogle.com\ngoogle.co.uk']

Which you can then use to get the urls that you'd like but you'd have to make sure to split them on r'\\n' as they may have a newline character within the text as seen above.