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Match single quotes from python re

How to match the following, I want all names to be contained within single quotes

This hasn't been much that much of a twist and turn to 'Tom','Harry' and u know who..yes its 'rock'

How to extract a name in single quotes only

name = re.compile(r'^\'+\w+\'')
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4 answers


The following regular expression finds all single words enclosed in quotation marks:

In [6]: re.findall(r"'(\w+)'", s)
Out[6]: ['Tom', 'Harry', 'rock']

Here:



  • '

    matches a single quote;
  • \w+

    matches one or more characters in a word;
  • '

    matches a single quote;
  • the parentheses form a capturing group: they define the part of the match that is returned findall()

    .

If you only want to find words that start with a capital letter, the regex can be modified like this:

In [7]: re.findall(r"'([A-Z]\w*)'", s)
Out[7]: ['Tom', 'Harry']
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I suggest

r = re.compile(r"\B'\w+'\B")
apos = r.findall("This hasn't been much that much of a twist and turn to 'Tom','Harry' and u know who..yes its 'rock'")

Result:

>>> apos
["'Tom'", "'Harry'", "'rock'"]


Negative word boundaries ( \B

) prevent matches such as 'n'

in words like Rock'n'Roll

.

Explanation:

\B  # make sure that we're not at a word boundary
'   # match a quote
\w+ # match one or more alphanumeric characters
'   # match a quote
\B  # make sure that we're not at a word boundary
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^

('hat' or 'caret', among other names) in the regex means "start of line" (or, if specific options are given, "start of line") that you don't like, Omitting this, your regex works fine:

>>> re.findall(r'\'+\w+\'', s)
["'Tom'", "'Harry'", "'rock'"]

Regular expressions suggested by others may be better for what you are trying to achieve, this is a minimal change to fix your problem.

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Your regex can only match after the beginning of the line. Try something like:r"'([^']*)'"

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