Regular expression

[Paul Hemans]

I need to extract the quoted text from :
_("get this")

The following works:
re.compile( "_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" )
However, I don't want to match if there is A-Z or a-z or 0-9 or _
immediately preceding the "_" so I have tried:
"[^0-9a-zA-Z]*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"[^\w]{0,1}_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"\W*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"

to match against:
skip this text _("get this")

Thanks

 

[MRAB]

I need to extract the quoted text from :
_("get this")

The following works:
re.compile( "_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" )
However, I don't want to match if there is A-Z or a-z or 0-9 or _
immediately preceding the "_" so I have tried:
"[^0-9a-zA-Z]*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"[^\w]{0,1}_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"\W*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"

to match against:
skip this text _("get this")

Use a negative lookbehind:

re.compile(r'''(?<!\w)_\(['"]([^'"]+)['"]\)''')

 

[John Bond]

I need to extract the quoted text from :
_("get this")

The following works:
re.compile( "_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)" )
However, I don't want to match if there is A-Z or a-z or 0-9 or _
immediately preceding the "_" so I have tried:
"[^0-9a-zA-Z]*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"[^\w]{0,1}_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"
"\W*_\(['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]\)"

to match against:
skip this text _("get this")

Use a negative lookbehind:

re.compile(r'''(?<!\w)_\(['"]([^'"]+)['"]\)''')

Slightly improved version that doesn't allow mixed quotes, eg. __("fred') :

re.compile(r'''(?<!\w)_\((['"])([^'"]+)\1\)''')

The starting quote is now captured as group 1, and has to terminate the
string too (use of \1).

Cheers, JB