Match 2 groups of numbers separated by specific characters

Question

Say I have a few strings, such as:

N00E001 N00W001 N00E002

What would be the best regex to find both groups of numbers in each string?

I'm not the best with regex. Here's what i'm currently working with: (\\d+)[W|E](\\d+) .

Answer 1

"(\d+)[W|E](\d+)"

would also match "N00|001" .

So

"(\d+)[WE](\d+)"

should do fine.

If you have always the exact same format, you could use a more restrictive regex :

"\A[NS]\d{2}[WE]\d{3}\Z"

This would match :

• a N or a S
• followed by 2 digits
• followed by E or W
• followed by 3 digits

The whole match should be the complete string. "Location N00W001" wouldn't match, for example.

Test

import re

strings = ["N00E001", "N00W001", "N00E002"]

pattern = re.compile("\A[NS]\d{2}[WE]\d{3}\Z")

print all(pattern.match(string) for string in strings)
# True