OCR and extracting text that follows a specific substring - regex using Python

Question

I'm pretty new to Regex, and so I am sure I am missing something obvious, but need a hand with the following problem.

I want to extract the string(s) that follows on from a specific substring. I am working off a list of scanned documents and have the following example string and I want to extract everything after "FORENAME"

This is what I have done so far:

regex = r"(?<=(FORE))[A-Z]+"

test_str = 'UNIQUE NUMBER 12345 678910 11 FROM THIS DOCUMENT | . ISSUED ON 2011-04-04 FORENAME GUIDO    \\ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.   '

matches = re.finditer(regex, test_str)

for matchNum, match in enumerate(matches, start=1):

    print ("Match {matchNum} was found at {start}-{end}: {match}".format(matchNum = matchNum, start = match.start(), end = match.end(), match = match.group()))

    for groupNum in range(0, len(match.groups())):
        groupNum = groupNum + 1

        print ("Group {groupNum} found at {start}-{end}: {group}".format(groupNum = groupNum, start = match.start(groupNum), end = match.end(groupNum), group = match.group(groupNum)))

Which returns the following:

 Match 1 was found at 78-82: NAME
 Group 1 found at 74-78: FORE

What I want it to return is:

GUIDO \ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.

Thanks!

Answer 1

What I want it to return is:

 GUIDO \ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.

Based on the above, you can use:

import re
test_str = 'UNIQUE NUMBER 12345 678910 11 FROM THIS DOCUMENT | . ISSUED ON 2011-04-04 FORENAME GUIDO    \\ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.'
result = re.sub(r"^.*FORENAME(.*?)$", r"\1", test_str)
print(result)
#  GUIDO    \ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.

Demo

Answer 2

You don't need regex for so simple problem

test_str = 'UNIQUE NUMBER 12345 678910 11 FROM THIS DOCUMENT | . ISSUED ON 2011-04-04 FORENAME GUIDO    \\ SURNAME VAN ROSSUM.   '

pos = test_str.find("FORENAME") + len("FORENAME")

print(test_str[pos:])