regex to match several string in Python

Question

I have questions with regex in Python.

Possible variations can be

10 hours, 12 weeks or 7 business days.

I want to have my regex something like

string = "I have an 7 business day trip and 12 weeks vacation."
re.findall(r'\d+\s(business)?\s(hours|weeks|days)', string)

so that I expect to find "7 business day" and "12 weeks" but it returns None

Answer 1

string = "I have an 7 business day trip and 12 weeks vacation."
print re.findall(r'\d+\s(?:business\s)?(?:hour|week|day)s?', string)
['7 business day', '12 weeks']

\d+\s(?:business\s)?(?:hour|week|day)s?

Debuggex Demo

The demo should explain how this works. The reason yours wasn't is because it was looking for 7 businessdays which doesn't match.

Although if you don't want to accept business week/hour , you'll need to modify it further:

\d+\s(?:hour|week|(?:business )?day)s?

Debuggex Demo

Answer 2

You need to tweak your regex to this:

>>> string = "I have an 7 business day trip and 12 weeks vacation."
>>> print re.findall(r'(\d+)\s*(?:business day|hour|week)s?', string)
['7', '12']

This matches any number that is followed by business day or hour or week and an optional s in the end.

Answer 3

Similar to @anubhava's answer but matches "7 business day" rather than just "7". Just move the closing parenthesis from after \\d+ to the end:

re.findall(r'(\d+\s*(?:business day|hour|week)s?)', string)

Answer 4

\\ d + \\ s +（业务）？（小时|周|天）s？