repeating a section of a regular expression?

Question

I'm having to parse a text dump of a spreadsheet. I have a regular expression that correctly parses each line of the data, but it's rather long. It's basically just matching a certain pattern 12 or 13 times.

The pattern I want to repeat is

\s+(\w*\.*\w*);

This is the regular expression (shortened)

^\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);

Is there a way to match a pattern a set number of times without copy pasting like this? Each of those sections correspond to data columns, all of which I need. I'm using Python by the way. Thanks!

Answer 1

(\\s+(\\w*\\.*\\w*);){12}

The {n} is a "repeat n times"

if you want "12 - 13" times,

(\\s+(\\w*\\.*\\w*);){12,13}

if you want "12+" times,

(\\s+(\\w*\\.*\\w*);){12,}

Answer 2

How about using:

[x.group() for x in re.finditer(r'(\s+(\w*\.*\w*);)*', text)]

Did you find the findall method yet? Or consider splitting at ; ?

map(lambda x: x.strip(), s.split(";"))

is probably what you really want.