Regex: Matching individual characters without matching characters inbetween

Question

I have a simple regex query.

Here is the input:

DLWLALDYVASQASV

The desired output are the positions of the bolded characters. DLWLAL DY VA S QASV

So it would be D:6, Y:7, S:10.

I am using python, so I know I can use span() or start() to obtain the start positions of a match. But if I try to use something like: DY.{2}S It will match the characters in between and only give me the position of the first (and last in the case of span) character of the match.

Is there a function or a way to retrieve the position of each specified character, not including the characters in-between?

Answer 1

match = re.search(r'(D)(Y)..(S)', 'DLWLALDYVASQASV')
print([match.group(i) for i in range(4)])
>>> ['DYVAS', 'D', 'Y', 'S']
print([match.span(i) for i in range(4)])
>>> [(6, 11), (6, 7), (7, 8), (10, 11)]
print([match.start(i) for i in range(4)])
>>> [6, 6, 7, 10]

You can take subexpressions of regular expression into brackets and then access the corresponding substrings via the match object. See the documentation of Match object for more details.