Hi first time regex user here. Just trying to figure out some regex but need some help.
I have a text file with the following items:
10:67 12:12 01:50 23:60 23:50
And I'm trying to get a list of the valid times so the output should be:
['12:12', '01:50', '23:50']
Here is my code:
import re
inFile = open("text.txt")
text = inFile.read()
pattern = re.findall('([01]\d|2[0-3]):[0-5]\d', text)
print pattern
My output is:
['12', '01', '23']
Any help figuring out whats wrong? Thanks!!!
Python apparently only prints the first group (that's ([01]\d|2[0-3]) in your case). If you make a non-capturing group ((?: ... )) of it, you should see the desired result:
text = '10:67 12:12 01:50 23:60 23:50'
pattern = re.findall('(?:[01]\d|2[0-3]):[0-5]\d', text)
print pattern
displays:
['12:12', '01:50', '23:50']
More info on (non-) capturing groups: http://www.regular-expressions.info/brackets.html
findall() returns all groups or, if there are no groups, the entire match (to see this, add a second group around the minutes to the original expression and Python will return a tuple). Making the group non-capturing is the correct answer though.