Regex: Issues with parsing text in single quotes

Asked Feb 18 '16 at 20:07

Active Feb 18 '16 at 20:14

Viewed 54 times

I am trying to parse the string enclosed in single quotes.

For Input: Redditor(user_name='abc')

My Output should be: abc

This is working as expected:

text = "Redditor(user_name='abc')"
author = re.findall(r'\'(.+?)\'', text)
print(author)

This isn't:

text = str(x.author) #I am getting x.author from API call. If I print x.author then it displays Redditor(user_name='abc') on the console so this is correct
author = re.findall(r'\'(.+?)\'', text)
print(author) #finds no match

Any ideas why it isn't working?

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

asked Feb 18 '16 at 20:07

90abyss

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Because `x.author` is a `Redditor` instance, not a string, and that is just its `__repr__`esentation? Try using `repr(x.author)`, or probably `x.author.user_name` will save you the regular expression. – jonrsharpe Feb 18 '16 at 20:09
Have you tried `str(x.author)` – Michal Frystacky Feb 18 '16 at 20:12
1

@MichalFrystacky note that the `__str__` may actually be different. – jonrsharpe Feb 18 '16 at 20:14
What does the API call return? Is it JSON or XML? You shouldn't need to parse an API response – Tim Feb 18 '16 at 20:15
@jonrsharpe repr(x.author) is working! thanks a lot! what exactly is the difference between repr and str? why didn't str work in this case? – 90abyss Feb 18 '16 at 21:09
And `.user_name`? I doubt you actually need to parse anything. – jonrsharpe Feb 18 '16 at 21:14
AttributeError: '' has no attribute 'user_name' – 90abyss Feb 18 '16 at 23:07
See [str() vs repr() functions in python 2.7.5](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19331404/str-vs-repr-functions-in-python-2-7-5). – Wiktor Stribiżew Feb 21 '16 at 23:02

Regex: Issues with parsing text in single quotes

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