How to match an optional entire phone number using regex in python

Question

it is my first time when I'm asking here for a solution after a long period of searching, and I want to tell you that I'm struggling to find the solution from days now for my particular and specific case, or maybe I missed it, but at least I will provide you with all the info you need. I've found and read many possible ways to solve my python regex, but I only found regexes only for isolated digits, characters or symbols, but not for an entire phone number in a simple specific format.

I will put here the content format of the text from where I'm trying to extract names, their phone numbers and email addresses (I apologize for not formatting but I don't know how to break lines in code area):

A lot of text... First Name1 0723-111-222 email@address1.com ...a lot of text
A lot of text... Second Name2 0723-333-444 ...a lot of text
A lot of text... Third Name3 email@address3.com ...a lot of text
A lot of text... Fourth Name4 0723-777-888 email@address4.com ...a lot of text
A lot of text... Fifth Name5 0723-999-000 email@address5.com ...a lot of text

The sequences of the text I want to extract it looks like this First Name1 0723-111-222 email@address1.com and so on. Now I have a regex that actually does this successfully, but with one exception. As you can see in the text sample above, also I have one string without email address and other string without phone number. So, the string without the email address is extracted successfully, but the one with the missing phone number is not, and in the script output is not printed.

The regex I'm running is this and I'm very close to get what I want:

'\w+s?\w+s?\w+\s\w+\s(?:\d+\-\d+\-\d+)?\s(?:[A-Za-z0-9\.\-+_*]+@[a-z0-9\.\-+_]+\.[a-z]+)?'

After I'm running the script the output is like:

First Name1 0723-111-222 email@address1.com
Second Name2 0723-333-444
Fourth Name4 0723-777-888 email@address4.com
Fifth Name5 0723-999-000 email@address5.com

So the main problem is with the (?:\d+\-\d+\-\d+)? sequence of regex that is not printing the Third Name3 email@address3.com in the output. What I need to add to the regex to be optional where the phone number is missing?

Sorry for the long description, but I wanted to provide enough info for you to understand what is the problem

Answer 1

You can use

\w+\s+\w+(?:(?:\s\d+-\d+-\d+)?\s+[A-Za-z0-9.+_*-]+@[a-z0-9.+_-]+\.[a-z]+|\s\d+-\d+-\d+)

See the regex demo.

The pattern basically follows this logic: <WORD> <WORD1> (optional_NUMBER EMAIL|NUMBER).

Details

• \w+\s+\w+ - one or more word chars, one or more whitespace and again one or more word chars (two whitespace separated "words")
• (?: - start of a non-capturing group:
  • (?:\s\d+-\d+-\d+)?\s+[A-Za-z0-9.+_*-]+@[a-z0-9.+_-]+\.[a-z]+ - an optional occurrence of whitespace, one or more digits, -, one or more digits, -, one or more digits, and then one or more whitespaces, one or more chars ASCII letters, digits, ., +, _, * or - chars, @, one or more ASCII lowercase letters, digits, ., +, _ or - chars, . and one or more lowercase ASCII letters
  • | - or
  • \s\d+-\d+-\d+ - whitespace, one or more digits, -, one or more digits, -, one or more digits
• ) - end of the non-capturing group.

NOTE:

• To match one or more whitespaces, always add + after \s (it is not the case in your current pattern)
• The email matching pattern might need more fine-tuning, see Extract email sub-strings from large document.