cannot get regex group capture in "either or" case

Question

I got something that works for one match but not two. I have to find any text such as "account" or "customer" in a file header. It could be one, both, or none. I have headers of a .csv (tab separated) like this:

test_header = apple   orange  account  customer

then I do

match = re.match(".*(account)|(customer).*", test_header, re.IGNORECASE)

The match is finding match.group(1) as "account", but I when I print match.group(2), it returns "None".

What am I missing? I've looked at other similar examples here but not finding what's wrong.

Regex is not the tool you want for the job you describe. All you need is `'account' in test_header` and `'customer' in test_header` to see if those values are present or not. — Karl Knechtel, Jun 01 '20 at 20:21

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 01 '20 at 20:14

1

Use re.findall():

import re


test_header = 'apple   orange  account  customer'
match = re.findall(r"account|customer", test_header, re.IGNORECASE)

print(match)

Output:

['account', 'customer']

answered Jun 01 '20 at 20:14

Terry Spotts

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You need to add word boundaries to the regex so that it does match, for example, "accounting". – Cary Swoveland Jun 01 '20 at 21:07

cannot get regex group capture in "either or" case

1 Answers1