Python - Locating the position of a regex match in a string

Question

I m currently using regular expressions to search through RSS feeds to find if certain words and phrases are mentioned  and would then like to extract the text on either side of the match as well  For example   String    This is an example sentence  it is for demonstration only  re search  is   String    I d like to know the position s  of where the  is  matches are found so that I can extract and output something like this     1 match found   This is an example sentence    I know that it would be easy to do with splits  but I d need to know what the index of first character of the match was in the string  which I don t know how to find

User · Answer

re Match objects have a number of methods to help you with this    gt  gt  gt  m   re search  is   String   gt  gt  gt  m span    2  4   gt  gt  gt  m start   2  gt  gt  gt  m end   4

User · Answer

You could use  find  is    it would return position of  is  in the string  or use  start   from re   gt  gt  gt  re search  is   String  start   2   Actually its match  is  from  This   If you need to match per word  you should use  b before and after  is    b is the word boundary    gt  gt  gt  re search r  bis b   String  start   5  gt  gt  gt    for more info about python regular expressions  docs here

User · Answer

I don t think this question has been completely answered yet because all of the answers only give single match examples   The OP s question demonstrates the nuances of having 2 matches as well as a substring match which should not be reported because it is not a word token   To match multiple occurrences  one might do something like this   iter   re finditer r  bis b   String  indices    m start 0  for m in iter    This would return a list of the two indices for the original string

[python] Python - Locating the position of a regex match in a string?

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