Parsing string with repeating pattern with regex in Python?

Question

I read a text file line by line with a Python script . What I get is a list of strings, one string per line. I now need to parse each string into more manageable data (ie strings, integers).

The strings look similar to this:

• "the description (number)" (eg "door (0)")
• "the description (number|number|number)" (eg "window (1|22|4))
• "the description (number|number|number|number)" (eg "toilet (2|6|5|10))

Now what I want is a list of split/parsed strings for each line from the text file that I can process further, for instance:

• "window (1|22|4)" -> [ "window", "1", "22", "4" ]

I guess regular expressions are the best fit to accomplish this and I already managed to come up with this:

• (.+)\\s+((\\d+)\\) , which perfectly matches for instance [ “door", "0" ] for "door (0)"

However, some items have more data to parse:

• (.+)\\s((\\d+)+\\|\\) , which matches only [ "window", "1" ] for "window (1|22|4)

How can I repeat the pattern matching for the part (\\d+)+\\|(ie "1|") up to the closing parenthesis for an undefined number repetitions of this pattern? The last item to match would be an integer, which could be caught separately with (\\d+)\\) .

Also is there a way to match either the simple or the extended case with a single regular expression?

Thanks! And have a nice weekend, everybody!

Answer 1

Here's the regex: \\w+ \\((\\d+\\|)*\\d+\\) . But imo you should do a mix of regex and str.split

data = []
with open("f.txt") as f:
    for line in f:
        word, numbers = re.search(r"(\w+) \(([^)]+)\)", line).groups()
        data.append((word, *numbers.split("|")))

print(data) # [('door', '0'), ('window', '1', '22', '4')]

Answer 2

import re
a = [r'door (0)',
    r'window (1|22|4)',
    r'toilet (2|6|5|10)'
]
for i in a: 
    print(re.findall('(\w+)',i))

Result:

['door', '0']
['window', '1', '22', '4']
['toilet', '2', '6', '5', '10']

Answer 3

Not a raw regex, but another way to extract and process that data can be to use TTP template

from ttp import ttp

template = """
<macro>
def process_matches(data):
    data["numbers"] = data["numbers"].split("|")
    return data
</macro>

<group name="{{ thing }}" macro="process_matches">
{{ thing }} ({{ numbers }})
</group>
"""

data = """
door (0)
window (1|22|4)
toilet (2|6|5|10)
"""

parser = ttp(data, template)
parser.parse()
print(parser.result(format="pprint")[0])

above code would produce

[   {   'door': {'numbers': ['0']},
        'toilet': {'numbers': ['2', '6', '5', '10']},
        'window': {'numbers': ['1', '22', '4']}}]