find a pattern using regular expression

Question

This is example of a test I have

JT  - American journal of public health
JID - 1254074
SB  - AIM
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Biomedical Research/*organization & administration
MH  - Female
MH  - Health Care Reform/*history/*methods
AB  - OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether a 2-phase labeling and choice 
AB-  architecture intervention
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20120417
LR  - 20170220
IS  - 1541-0048 (Electronic)

How I can write a regular expression to identify only vocabularies after all lines start with "MH" and then import them them to an excel sheet. The out put should be like this:

[Adult, Biomedical Research, organization & administration, Female, Health Care Reform, history, methods]. 

This is my try:

import re
Path = "MH\s*.*" 
re.findall(Path,file) 

I know this is wrong, but I do not know how to solve it.

Thank you

Answer 1

Using re.findall

Demo:

import re
s = """JT  - American journal of public health
JID - 1254074
SB  - AIM
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Biomedical Research/*organization & administration
MH  - Female
MH  - Health Care Reform/*history/*methods
AB  - OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether a 2-phase labeling and choice 
AB-  architecture intervention
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20120417
LR  - 20170220
IS  - 1541-0048 (Electronic)"""

res = []
for i in re.findall(r"MH\s+-\s+(.*)", s, flags=re.MULTILINE):
    res.extend(i.split("/*"))
print( res )

Output:

['Adult', 'Biomedical Research', 'organization & administration', 'Female', 'Health Care Reform', 'history', 'methods']

Answer 2

It looks like you'll need to do a few regexes since you also want to split on /* for some of the rows. This should do the trick!

import re

my_file = """JT  - American journal of public health
JID - 1254074
SB  - AIM
SB  - IM
MH  - Adult
MH  - Biomedical Research/*organization & administration
MH  - Female
MH  - Health Care Reform/*history/*methods
AB  - OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether a 2-phase labeling and choice
AB-  architecture intervention
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20120417
LR  - 20170220
IS  - 1541-0048 (Electronic)"""

my_list = my_file.splitlines()

new_list = []

for item in my_list:
    if re.search("^MH\s*-", item):
        item = re.sub("[^-]+-\s*", "", item)
        item = item.split("/*")
        new_list = new_list + item

print(new_list)

Output:

['Adult', 'Biomedical Research', 'organization & administration', 'Female', 'Health Care Reform', 'history', 'methods']

I'm taking that string and putting it into a list. I figure there is a good chance you'll have that string as a list when it gets imported. I also like working with 1 line at a time with doing regexes, just easier to troubleshoot later.

I'm matching items that start with MH then capturing them. I then split each on /* and put all those items together into a nice list you can use for your excel export.

Answer 3

Just posting code what I tried, before noticing that while coding a nicer answer was posted.
Please don't judge. That just happens on SO.

s = """
JT  - American journal of public health
JID - 1254074
MH  - Adult
MH  - Biomedical Research/*organization & administration
MH  - Health Care Reform/*history/*methods
AB  - OBJECTIVES: We assessed whether a 2-phase labeling and choice
"""

import re
import itertools
matches = re.findall(r"^MH[\s-]+(.*)$", s, re.MULTILINE)
splitmatches = [i.split(r"/*") for i in matches]
flattenedmatches = list(itertools.chain(*splitmatches))

print(flattenedmatches)

Output:

['Adult', 'Biomedical Research', 'organization & administration', 'Health Care Reform', 'history', 'methods']