How to match regex with multiple overlapping patterns?

Question

The context

I have a string made of mixed mp3 information that I must try to match against a pattern made of arbitrary strings and tokens. It works like that:

1. The program shows the user a given string

the Beatles_Abbey_Road-SomeWord-1969

1. User enter a pattern to help program parse the string

the %Artist_%Album-SomeWord-%Year

1. Then I'd like to show results of the matches (but need your help for that)

2 possible matches found:
[1] {'Artist': 'Beatles', 'Album':'Abbey_Road', 'Year':1969}
[2] {'Artist': 'Beatles_Abbey', 'Album':'Road', 'Year':1969}

The problem

As an example, let say pattern is artist name followed by title (delimiter: '-').

Example 1:

>>> artist = 'Bob Marley'
>>> title = 'Concrete Jungle'
>>> re.findall(r'(.+)-(.+)', '%s-%s' % (artist,title))
[('Bob Marley', 'Concrete Jungle')]

So far, so good. But...
I have no control over the delimiter used and have no guarantee that it's not present in the tags, so trickier cases exist:

Example 2:

>>> artist = 'Bob-Marley'
>>> title = 'Roots-Rock-Reggae'
>>> re.findall(r'(.+)-(.+)', '%s-%s' % (artist,title))
[('Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock', 'Reggae')]

As expected, it doesn't work in that case.

How can I generate all possible combinations of artist/title?

[('Bob', 'Marley-Roots-Rock-Reggae'),
 ('Bob-Marley', 'Roots-Rock-Reggae')
 ('Bob-Marley-Roots', 'Rock-Reggae'),
 ('Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock', 'Reggae')]

Are regex the tool to use for that job?

Please keep in mind that number of tags to match and delimiters between those tags are not fixed but user defined (so the regex to use has to be buildable dynamically).
I tried to experiment with greedy vs minimal matching and lookahead assertions with no success.

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

This solution seems to work. In addition to the regex you will need a list of tuples to describe the pattern, where each element corresponds to one capturing group of the regex.

For your Beatles example, it would look like this:

pattern = r"the (.+_.+)-SomeWord-(.+)"
groups = [(("Artist", "Album"), "_"), ("Year", None)]

Because the Artist and Album are only split by a single separator, they will be captured together in one group. The first item in the list indicates that the first capture group will be split into and Artist and an Album , and will use _ as the separator. The second item in the list indicates that the second capture group will be used as the Year directly, since the second element in the tuple is None . You could then call the function like this:

>>> get_mp3_info(groups, pattern, "the Beatles_Abbey_Road-SomeWord-1969")
[{'Album': 'Abbey_Road', 'Year': '1969', 'Artist': 'Beatles'}, {'Album': 'Road', 'Year': '1969', 'Artist': 'Beatles_Abbey'}]

Here is the code:

import re
from itertools import combinations

def get_mp3_info(groups, pattern, title):
    match = re.match(pattern, title)
    if not match:
        return []
    result = [{}]
    for i, v in enumerate(groups):
        if v[1] is None:
            for r in result:
                r[v[0]] = match.group(i+1)
        else:
            splits = match.group(i+1).split(v[1])
            before = [d.copy() for d in result]
            for comb in combinations(range(1, len(splits)), len(v[0])-1):
                temp = [d.copy() for d in before]
                comb = (None,) + comb + (None,)
                for j, split in enumerate(zip(comb, comb[1:])):
                    for t in temp:
                        t[v[0][j]] = v[1].join(splits[split[0]:split[1]])

                if v[0][0] in result[0]:
                    result.extend(temp)
                else:
                    result = temp
    return result

And another example with Bob Marley:

>>> pprint.pprint(get_mp3_info([(("Artist", "Title"), "-")],
...               r"(.+-.+)", "Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock-Reggae"))
[{'Artist': 'Bob', 'Title': 'Marley-Roots-Rock-Reggae'},
 {'Artist': 'Bob-Marley', 'Title': 'Roots-Rock-Reggae'},
 {'Artist': 'Bob-Marley-Roots', 'Title': 'Rock-Reggae'},
 {'Artist': 'Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock', 'Title': 'Reggae'}]

Answer 2

What about something like this instead of using a regular expression?

import re

string = "Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock-Reggae"

def allSplits(string, sep):
    results = []
    chunks = string.split('-')
    for i in xrange(len(chunks)-1):
        results.append((
            sep.join(chunks[0:i+1]),
            sep.join(chunks[i+1:len(chunks)])
        ))

    return results

print allSplits(string, '-')

[('Bob', 'Marley-Roots-Rock-Reggae'),
 ('Bob-Marley', 'Roots-Rock-Reggae'),
 ('Bob-Marley-Roots', 'Rock-Reggae'),
 ('Bob-Marley-Roots-Rock', 'Reggae')]