Here's the line I'm trying to parse:
@abc def@gmail.com @ghi j@klm @nop.qrs @tuv
And here's the regex I've gotten so far:
@[A-Za-z]+[^0-9. ]+\b | @[A-Za-z]+[^0-9. ]
My goal is to get ['@abc', '@ghi', '@tuv'], but no matter what I do, I can't get 'j@klm' to not match. Any help is much appreciated.
Try using re.findall with the following regex pattern:
(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\s))@[A-Za-z]+(?=\s|$)
inp = "@abc def@gmail.com @ghi j@klm @nop.qrs @tuv"
matches = re.findall(r'(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\s))@[A-Za-z]+(?=\s|$)', inp)
print(matches)
This prints:
['@abc', '@ghi', '@tuv']
The regex calls for an explanation. The leading lookbehind (?:(?<=^)|(?<=\s)) asserts that what precedes the @ symbol is either a space or the start of the string. We can't use a word boundary here because @ is not a word character. We use a similar lookahead (?=\s|$) at the end of the pattern to rule out matching things like @nop.qrs. Again, a word boundary alone would not be sufficient.
just add the line initiation match at the beginning:
^@[A-Za-z]+[^0-9. ]+\b | @[A-Za-z]+[^0-9. ]
it shoud work!
