Question mark in regex python +\]\""). I’ve never done this regex How to properly escape question mark in regex? 13 | 0. Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. This Python Regex series contains the following in-depth tutorial. First, the engine starts trying to match the regex at the beginning of the string. Share. The second part of the regex [cde]? defines a character class [cde] which reads as “match either c , d , or e “. W3Schools offers free online tutorials, references and exercises in all the major languages of the web. The question mark is called a quantifier. ; Regex A* matches zero or more occurrences of A. Why the \s? here; the . 00:00 In the previous lesson, I showed you how to multiply your regular expression using quantifiers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the question mark metacharacter and how you can make any RegEx pattern I am trying to find every Question Phrase with python regex, So basically I need to find a initial ponctuation, and detect everything inside until the question mark, avoiding other pontuations in the middle. I am trying to write regex in python for either single or double quotation marks from these examples: animal="cat" animal="horse" animal='dog' animal='cow' It comes up empty when trying with | Though regex implementation is mostly similar across different programming languages, there can be minor differences. Python urljoin does not join string properly if it starts with question mark. ("\"") approach works if the strings have patterns in which substrings are embedded within quotation marks. Image: Leonardo AI Example 1: Matching a File Path. The re module is part of the standard library, and it provides a more limited set of functionality. sub in python 2. re. For example, we can write: import re snow_regex = re. (question mark): Matches zero or one occurrence of the preceding character. It matches any character. A string literal is what you put between " or ' and the python interpreter parses this string and puts it into memory. ; 00:00 In the previous lesson, I showed you how to use anchors to change where the matches happen inside of a string. Difficulty running regetron in cmd. search( question_text ): print `question_text`, "contains a question" Regex for extracting string with interrogation (?) mark in Python. Join our first live community AMA this Wednesday, February 26th, at 3 PM ET. I assume searching each word for a ? is not the best way. Syntax and Special Characters of Regex Escaping in Python. 5. It means nothing, except special cases like, for example, clustering without capturing (also known as a non-capturing group): (?:pattern) Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. ; Create a Regex object with the re. 2. 0. Click me to see the solution. You can directly read those. In the first ca When a string is interpolated as a regex, it isn't matched literally, but interpreted as a regex. To match a question mark in Python regex, use the ? character. tokenize import WhitespaceTokenizer, word_tokenize text = "My weight is about 68 kg, +/- You're getting confused by the difference between a string and a string literal. Follow edited Nov 25, 2014 at 18:02. Learn dot, asterisk, plus, caret, dollar, question mark, and other regex metacharacters. For example, I want to find the occurrences of question marks and periods along with all the other non alphanumeric characters. string consists of punctuation. [Booboo2020] Booboo, Answer to ``Python Regex to find a string in double quotes within a string'', Stack Exchange, Inc. Therefore, the engine skips ahead to the next regex token: r. MERose. dot metacharacter. The following should deal with U. !][A-Za-z\s]*\?') and then I use this regex to find questions inside this text: Here's what happens when the regex engine tries to match . python single quotes around certain parts of strings. Master Python's regex quantifiers (*, +, ?, {}) with practical examples. This should be easy and this regex works fine to search for words beginning with specific characters, but I can't get it to match hashes and question marks. list of phrases is in a . In the example that you gave: ls lis[!ta]* it is the POSIX way of negating (or complementing) a character class. compile() function. Follow edited Nov 19, 2012 at 2:53. (the question mark after the escaped asterisk). findall(r'#(\w+)', ud. /\\-]*)"' m = re. Python regex metacharacters Regex . The Overflow Blog Research roadmap update, February 2025. Python regex email example. Python regex - stripping out HTML tags and formatting characters from inner HTML. compile(r"\b([a])(\w+)\b") But these don't match: Tried: What does mean in a Python regular expression - Non capturing groupsIf we do not want a group to capture its match, we can write this regular expression as Set(?:Value). As the name suggests, it will then go over the string, and escape all of the characters that have special meaning in regex. The pattern starts with a (?x) which is an unfamiliar regex to me. The question mark (?) is used to match zero or one character. 00:13 First, a little review. The examples work with quantifiers, character classes, alternations, and groups. 3. Python -- Regex match pattern OR end of string. g. Regex for preg_match with English and Japanese words. *? will already match the space. Viewed 163 times Browse other questions tagged . The question mark (?) makes the i'm trying to remove question marks from a string in python and I'm wondering what the most efficient way to do it is. The greedy subpattern . :) – Tyler Crompton. Modified 10 years, 9 months ago. Search for question mark with Regex in C#. Here an example of test. For example, a \d in a regex stands for a digit character — that is, any single numeral between 0 and 9. This article will explore how to effectively use question marks in regular expressions, providing examples Use metacharacter in Python regex with examples. Check Phone Numbers Using Regex In Python. EDIT: If the value following n must be either an integer or a ?, matching any character including newlines in a Python regex subexpression, not globally. This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to using regular expressions (regex) in Python. Write a Python program to find the sequences of one upper case letter followed by lower case letters. I looked it up in an online regex tester, which seems to say that it's invalid. The engine always attempts to match that component. I I'm parsing xml data with Python, the xml file contains urls and as you know url can't be parsed directly through regex because their format doesn't fit, there are characters which blocks the parsing . The first anchor I showed you was the caret symbol (^). If you mark your string The question mark in . To remove URLs from a string in Python, you can either use regular expressions (regex) or some external libraries like urllib. import re largeString = 'abcdefgTHIS NEEDS TO GO?abdehdfenTHIS NEEDS TO GO But, if you are certain that the questions always end with a question mark, you could do something as simple as. In that way it’s similar to the *, but not any number of characters. possible duplicate of Regex to remove newline character from string How to use python regex to match words beginning with hash and question mark? 0. sub. Let’s take a look in IDLE. Alternatively, you can use Why do we use question mark literal in Python regular expression? The question mark makes the previous token in the regular expression optional. And you matched all of the goals . In this lesson, I’ll show you how to group parts of your regular expression together in subsets. ) Consider checking it out from your library. It doesn't "belong" to either. If we place a question mark after the preceding range, the regex pattern will only traverse and match the minimum amount of repetitions and will not the maximum. python regex match single quote. ? is a special character in regexes, and cannot (usually) be used on its own. python re This allows for any number of spaces and question marks and guarantees that at least one question mark is present. Note: there will be various characters inbetween that I would like to capture also e. Hot Network Questions Does this average exist? Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. python; html; regex; or ask your own question. Regex match everything after question mark? 1. Don't forget the quotation marks in the return statements. If you want them to be part of the actual expression, you'll need to add more, and escape them with a backslash (r"\"\[. ; Since this causes the rest of the match to fail, the regex engine backtracks until it finds a way to match Try this: \?(. <anything> that follows (or doesn't) the pattern _a. I've tried the following regex: '\d+. Again, the question mark indicates the zero-or-one matching requirement. regex match question. *) I would recommend you avoid trying to do this with a regex and use a tool that has been designed for the job. For example, the following code will match strings that contain either one or two question marks: import re pattern = r"\?\??" test_string = "This string contains one question mark?" The question mark and the colon after the opening parenthesis are the syntax that creates a non-capturing group. MULTILINE)? Also, string is a really bad name for Understanding regex escaping is crucial for developers who want to effectively utilize regex in their Python applications. Commented Nov 18, 2013 at 11:27. findall('[\w]+', string, re. The ? matches any single character in a pattern. The final question mark is the quantifier that makes the previous token optional. parse. But this fails to match n as well. Write a Python program that matches a string that has an 'a' followed by anything ending in Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Python regex quantifiers to define how many times a character or a character set can be repeated. Improve this question. python; regex; string; split; punctuation; or ask your own question. Python re. Add a comment | 8 Python regex re. In other words (?:^|\n) Non-capturing group 1st Alternative: ^ ^ assert position at start of the string 2nd Alternative: \n \n Those double-quotes in your regular expression are delimiting the string rather than part of the regular expression. The square brackets ([ and Understanding the Question Mark Quantifier. Then I want to insert them into a csv file. I need to use regex to strip punctuation at the start and end of a word. compile(r'[?. Programming Python How to search for question mark and / with regular expression ? python. You look like you're looking for just the words? If so, what's wrong with m = re. , New York, NY, March 29, 2014. Mentioning this because they're super useful, but I didn't Ask questions and share your thoughts on the future of Stack Overflow. What’s the difference between the question mark quantifier (?), the plus quantifier (+), and the asterisk quantifier (*)?Say, you have regular expression pattern A. It seems like regex would be the best option for this. if question_text. " ?? means "only match this if necessary, otherwise match nothing. compile( r"\w+\?\s*" ) if p. M. I am not sure how to do the regex because I don't have that much experience with python. I have to get any link (as text) that doesn't have a question mark, for Extracting the exact word between two words without question mark in python using REGEX. 9. dis-juncting ( or Break) the string based on a punctuation in python. Python regexp - remove punctuation but leave <unk> as is. Pattern object. So, essentially I want to exclude all those strings containing the word "you". Hot Network Questions However, the question mark tells the regex engine that failing to match u is acceptable. and also Peter's:. If the string can contain new lines you may have to use the "dot all" modifier to allow the dot to match the new line character. 1. Regex: Match a Python keyword. If you want to use (and understand) regular expressions in practice, you’ll need to know all of them by heart! To search for a literal ? character, you need to escape it with a \. Correct python re regex. In Python regular expressions, the question mark quantifier implies matching either zero or one occurrence of the preceding pattern. e. Browse other questions tagged . txt files But when I run the same file from command line in Windows 10 I get a strange question marks: In Google Colab it also works as expected: Can't get python replace regex to work. This link helps What is the regex to find a single line of text preceding a question mark? example text: now"? The RegEx of accepted answer returns the values including their sourrounding quotation marks: "Foo Bar" and "Another Value" as matches. me-_/\\" please help with python regex' pattern = r'"([A-Za-z0-9_\. This works and matches words beginning a: r = re. I'm trying to find if a particular sentence pattern has an abbreviated word like R. normalize("NFC",str1)) Or if you only what to focus on Latin script, including non-spacing marks (i. A. Viewed 9k times regex; python-2. match() only produces a match if the expression is found at the beginning Followup to "what's the point of something like a lazy optional match (double question mark in regex) ?" I just figured out the weird edge cases where they differ. Follow answered Feb 4, 2012 at 17:16 Python Regex matching choice between "\*" (literal This string "'\1'" is parsed by the language as ' plus the octal character 001 plus another ' So you are substituting a quoted control-1 character. Then use the python method findall in re to find all occurrences of the match. sub regex. " In the string "cacao tabasco tobacco" I am trying to count the number of times punctuation characters appear in a novel. – Question Mark. 8. python re. How to add a new column to an existing DataFrame. Python Regex get everything within parentheses unless in quotes. As an example in Clojure, if you wanted to match the string foo?, you could use (re-find #"foo\?" "foo?") where \? escapes the question mark in the regular expression so that it is One of the most versatile characters in regex is the question mark (?). 1 answer Python: regex for list of phrases containing question marks. 7. Hot Network Questions In the following script I would like to pull out text between the double quotes ("). In the Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. The question mark (?) is a quantifier in regular expressions that indicates that the preceding element should be matched zero or one time. endswith("?"): print `question_text`, "is a question" Or: import re p = re. The question mark quantifier is the simplest quantifier to comprehend. 11. group() The output should be find. The [a-zA-Z0-9\?]+ matches one-or-more occurrences of the characters given in the character class i. Double escape the escape like this "'\\1'" and it will feed the quoted backreference '\1' as the replacefment. Here are RegEx which return only the values between quotation marks (as the questioner was asking for): Double quotes only (use value of capture group #1): "(. 00:12 First, a little review of The question mark after the opening bracket is unrelated to the question mark at the end of the regex. match Issue. Your regex means "exactly one lowercase character followed by one or more asterisks". Python RegEx Demystified: Deciphering the Art of Pattern Matching with Python's re Module Coding Questions; Non-coding Questions; Data Projects; Guides The question mark ? matches 0 or 1 repetition of the previous Do not forget to escape the question mark, since it is also a regex symbol. Confusion with re. ; Python regex match: A Comprehensive guide for pattern matching. import regex as re # import unicodedata as ud import unicodedataplus as ud hashtags = re. The non-greediness causes the pattern to match when it encounters the first unescaped double quotation mark. Covering popular subjects like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL, Java, and many, many more. Improve this answer. Follow edited Apr 18, 2015 at 9:18. The vertical bar (|) is used to match one of two characters. My initial thought was it represents an optional left Optional Matching with the Question Mark. RegEx Series. The question mark and the colon after the opening parenthesis are the syntax that creates a non-capturing group. Here’s the code I’m using and the results. me-/\. 7; html-parsing; Share. a-z, A-Z and digits from 0-9, and the question mark ?. Commented Aug 13, 2011 at 14:36. ; Python regex search: Search for the first occurrences of the regex pattern inside !is used in both shell globs and regular expressions. Introduction to Python regex quantifiers. Hot Network Questions Python regular expressions tutorial shows how to use regular expressions in Python. Ask Question Asked 10 years, 9 months ago. Python regex - OR in the middle of the capture group. This quantifier cannot appear after an opening parenthesis, because there is nothing to be made optional at the start of a group. You can use RegEx in Python after importing re module. Scraping data from a website using Python 2. Python regex compile: Compile a regular expression pattern provided as a string into a re. We can add a question mark to the end of a group, which makes the group optional for matching purposes. An abbreviated words that I am looking for is words with capital letters punctuated with period like R. This returns a Match object. This is useful to build complex regexes, e. Python regex issues In both cases the question mark must be at the end. or CEO. One quality every engineering manager should Colon : is simply colon. csv. Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 21:21. These need to be handled carefully in a A regular expression (regex) is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern in text. In this lesson, I’m going to be talking about quantifiers: how to do repetition inside of your pattern matches. For instance, \n is converted to a newline character, \t is converted to a tab character, etc. This story covers the basics of regex. or all caps. Question mark in regex not working as expected. The following table shows all the quantifiers and their meanings: The metacharacter that helps achieve laziness is the question mark ?. The question mark makes the preceding token in the regular expression optional. Question mark meta character. Inside the regular expression, a dot operators represents any character except the newline character, which is \n. Consider a situation where you need to match a file path. +? makes the pattern non-greedy. However, the python interpreter is not happy and I can't figure out why import re text = 'Hello, "find. *) The parentheses are a capturing group that you can use to extract the part of the string you are interested in. Modified 2 years, 2 months ago. re. Now, the engine can only conclude that the entire regular expression cannot be matched starting at the c in colonel. ^The matches 'The' at the beginning of this string. How to match double quote in python regex? 2. So I came with the code: questionRegex = re. from nltk. S. Collectives™ on Stack Overflow. Matching a string in curly quotation marks. Python regex: split by repeated punctuation marks. Learn how to control pattern matching frequency and create flexible regular expressions for text processing. [] (square brackets): Matches any character inside the brackets. Find Questions Phrases using Python REGEX. Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. \netc . I'm trying to learn Atom's syntax highlighting/grammar rules, which heavily use JS regular expressions, and came across an unfamiliar pattern in the python grammar file. – BrtH. For example: colou?r is complementary to I need to exclude a question mark from a string using the exclusion of that character, but I still get some undesired results. glob(). and up to and including the ?. combining diacritics): Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. – user13843220 What is question mark in python regex? The question mark quantifier indicates that you want to match either one or zero occurrences of this pattern. search(msg) snow_match_2 = snow Important Regex Concept: Greediness. Python's re module mishandles backslash. 4,441 7 7 gold badges 56 56 silver badges 86 86 bronze badges. It applies directly to the pattern immediately preceding it. sub : something. This article The regex module in Python is a separate module that is not part of the standard library. It helps you make any RegEx pattern optional. compile(r'snow(shoe)?') msg = 'I am walking on a snowshoe' msg_2 = 'I am walking on snow' snow_match = snow_regex. Related. (Remember to use a raw string. As for replacing the question mark, adding parentheses in your expression like so: '(\w+?)\?(\w+?)' creates 2 capture groups which you can then reference as group number one and group number 2 in your desired output like so: '\1\2' omitting the question mark. strip(). This character is used to indicate that the preceding character is optional. python; regex; quotation-marks; Share. If yes, then it matches the characters mentioned above. ) Pass the string you want to search into the Regex object’s search() method. Python's re module provides a comprehensive set of functions to work with regular expressions. how do I find all sentences with a question mark at the end? Specifically the character immediately after . Modified 10 years, 3 months ago. python's re: multiple regex. 13. Try Teams for free Explore Teams. answered Question mark in regex not working as expected. sub(r'\s([?. ? means "match this whenever possible, otherwise match nothing. ; Regex A+ matches one or more occurrences of A. It can detect the presence or absence of a text by matching it with a particular pattern and also can split a pattern into one or more sub-patterns. ; 👉 Related article: Python Regex this ensures the question mark is in fact in the middle of a word. In regular expressions, quantifiers match the preceding characters or character sets a number of times. To get an actual \ character, you can escape it as well, so \\ gives a single Put a group around the text you want to keep and refer to that group by number in the replacement pattern:. Searching for a specific phrase in CSV file using regex in Python. (The first edition covered Python’s now-removed regex module, which won’t help you much. Teams. First, the Python interpreter itself performs substitutions for \ before the re module ever sees your string. Regex A? matches zero or one occurrences of A. What is the Question Mark ? Metacharacter? The question mark ? metacharacter is a quantifier that The question mark quantifier—Python re ? —is only one of many regex operators. escape on it before giving it to any search-parameter. *(def) against abc defg:. E. In this story, you’ll learn to use regex in Python. Explore Teams. The code that some of the other answers have given will then work as the question needs. The point was more that the question mark isn't useful there. * initially tries to match as many times as it can, matching the entire string. Ask Question Asked 2 years, 2 months ago. The regex engine has two options in response to the question mark: either try to match the portion to which the question mark pertains, or don't try to match it. The confusion is due to the fact that the backslash character \ is used as an escape at two different levels. How to properly escape question mark in regex? 00:00 Let’s take a look at the next wildcard character, the ? (question mark). Specific Punctuation Stripping Python. Another way to do this would be to use a lookbehind . If you are Following my previous question I would like to know how to get multiline strings within accolade or quotation mark. – Martijn Pieters. In Python, regex pattern strings can contain a variety of ?: starts a non matching group , so (?:_a) is matching the _a but not enumerating it, the following question mark makes it optional. colou?r matches both colour and color. alecxe Write a Python program to find sequences of lowercase letters joined by an underscore. Regular expressions (regex) are a powerful tool for pattern matching and data extraction in text processing. What's the proper regex for removing "?()" Unfortunately, it exclusively concentrates on Perl and Java’s flavours of regular expressions, and doesn’t contain any Python material at all, so it won’t be useful as a reference for programming in Python. The re-module in Python is used for working with regular expressions. Following regex is used in Python to match a If your strings inside of itemList only contain strings, (don't contain any regex) then you can use re. +\]"'). File paths contain special characters like slashes (/) and dots (. You can make What does “?:” mean in a Python regular expression? If we do not want a group to capture its match, we can write this regular expression as Set (?:Value). The question mark (?) meta character is a quantifier that matches the previous element zero or one time. !"](?:\s|$))', r'\1', text) Note that I used a r'' raw string to avoid having to use too many backslashes; you didn't need to add quite so many, however. Learn the basics of regex patterns and how to search, find, and replace text data with Python's re module. match(pattern, text) print m. *(?!you)\?$' but it matches the second case (probably because of . 204. *?[^\\])" Single quotes only (use value of capture Ask questions, find answers and collaborate at work with Stack Overflow for Teams. Python regex to match a quoted string. The regex Set(Value)? matches Set or SetValue. Any character means letters uppercase or lowercase, digits 0 through 9, and symbols such as the dollar ($) sign or the pound (#) symbol, punctuation mark (!) such as the question mark (?) Import the regex module with import re. See more linked questions. I also adjusted the match for the following space; it now matches either a space or the end of the string. It allows you to specify that the element is optional, meaning it may occur once or not at all. 00:16 Once again, you’re inside of your notes directory, and you can call notes_dir. Removing Question marks from string [closed] Ask Question Asked 11 years, 5 months ago. (-->) here, because the question mark makes it non-greedy. 1338. Java regex exact match with question mark and word boundary. So in English, this says, match the ending . The question mark In this article, we’ll take a look at the question mark metacharacter and how you can make any RegEx pattern optional with it. The first greedy metacharacter that this course introduces is the question mark. Altogether, the regex first checks if there is a question mark somewhere in the string to be matched. RegEx to capture all variations of the same search time. txt file: TOTO_TEST = { 0x68, 0x65, 0x6c, 0x6c, 0x6f } Here is my python example code: In a string I want to find what we call “macros”, but only some of them, and I want to find all macros that match: <rx;ABC123>, or <grf;ABC144> or <grfa;BDB199>. Ask Question Asked 10 years, 3 months ago. @VaradBhatnagar You would need to escape the ? character in your regular expression. . Alternatively, enclose the string in single quotes instead (r'"\[. spnn hrofpeb lflbu rbr unwzcp vpr yni nwr hxfonr kbfswah jnjn jwy xuspjvn qhcak dqbmemw