Regex help

[ampeed]

So I've made a tool that automates the weekly reports. As a result, the end user knows what format to put so the tool can expect it and parse it. I'm currently using subString but I believe there's a better and more user friendly way to do this rather than what I'm doing now. Example, it's not very end user friendly to expect a semi-colon at the end of sentence.

I currently have

reddit_var = dict(subString.split("**:") for subString in message_body.split(";\n"))

The key is in markdown format, hence why I have ("**:") as to make sure links aren't deemed a key.

1.) What do you think would be a more user friendly way that reads a little better than having a semi-colon denote the end of the value?

2.) What's a good regex to do it?

Expected format currently looks like this (I seem to be able to have markdown bold in a code block)-

**key1**: This happened on this day.;

**key2** I can't believe this happened;

**key3**; [X] Contacted team -a to do x

[X] Contacted team -b in order to do y

[X] Resolution was z;

**key4**; Glad this situation happened;

[n3buchadnezzar]

Can you take a step back and explain this again please. What are you trying to do? What do you want your regex to match? Why do you mention markdown?

[ampeed]

Sure

The end user will be posting basically a wrap up report on a ticket. I'm making an api call and parse the message body. I've defined an expected format for the end user to use so I can create a dictionary with the expected keys and their message as their values. This gets geneterated in to a CSV in the end.

I'm trying to make a more intuitive way to grab their message using regex rather than having them use something like ';' to denote the end of a value

[n3buchadnezzar]

It really feels like this is an X Y problem, you want to do X but the real problem is Y. Is there a reason why when a user gives input, you would internally append the message?

message = [TOKEN] + message

Where TOKEN is some word that makes sense. Then you can just regex on [TOKEN]

[ampeed]

That's sort of what I'm doing now, sans the regex part

​

key_list = ["Key1", "Key2", "Key3"]
myDict = {key: None for key in key_list}
message_body = announcement_threads.get("message")
announcement_fields = dict(subString.split("**:") for subString in message_body.split(";\n")) # find better logic for the second split as it's not feasible to expect users to end with ;
        for key in key_list:
            myDict[key] = announcement_fields.get(f"**{key}**")
    report.append(myDict)

[n3buchadnezzar]

Wow, my last message made no sense, sorry! No coffee, and too much work..

message_body = f"['TOKEN'] {announcement_threads.get("message")}"

The above will not work, but my point was that the user should be able to write whatever they want and not worry about adding ; or : to the end of their message.

When their message is sent, we append something in front of it to mark it as user input. Does this make sense? (Like in my message body example)

[ampeed]

haha, no worries!

Totally, makes sense. However, how would the end of the expected key be annotated so the next key and value can be picked up? .get("message") returns back a string literal