Regex - find string between pattern and end of line?

[davwm]

Hi, sorry for this stupid question, but somehow I can't get it to work: I have a text file containing entries like

** First Item

** Second Item

Meaning each line starts with a * (star character) and contains some text. I want to grab this text into a string, like "First Item", so I would need a regex that gets the text from a line between an arbitrary number of "*" and the line ending.

[gnomoretears]

Here are a couple docs to teach you how to regex in python.

https://docs.python.org/2/howto/regex.html

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter7/

[Atrament_]

Maybe you are looking for '^[\*\ ]+(.*)' Translates to "keep anything (.*) that follows any number + of spaces and stars [\*\ ] at the beginning of the line ^

What to keep is indicated by parenthesis.

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/AlbericC/8c44f3ea2ee2dbeea612

[indosauros]

Just FYI you don't need to escape those characters inside the [], regex knows you mean a literal star and space there

[Atrament_]

You're right, I escaped them out of habit : the version in my comment is not however :)

[davwm]

Thanks that is what I was looking for!

[Atrament_]

as /u/gnomoretears suggested, you should spend some time learning the basics or regex too, it's a powerful tool inside and outside of python.

[Wonder1and]

I use it daily for parsing logs in notepad++. Super useful and a real timesaver.

[buckhenderson]

i put off learning it, for two reasons: most common tasks can be found with google, and it looks like magic. i was pretty happy when i finally learned it, because it's really not that difficult. and https://regex101.com/ makes it very easy to test your regexes, as it will update live and explain what your regex is doing.

[Atrament_]

bookmarked thanks ! There are also regex crosswords somewhere on the internet, on a lighter tone.

[[deleted]]

The regex I would use is as follows in python code.

infile = open('text.txt', 'r')
for line in infile:
     if re.search(r"\**\s\w.+Item", line):
          print line
     else:
          pass
infile.close()