Is there a better way to pull A and F from this: A13:F20
a="A13:F20" import re pattern = re.compile(r'\D+\d+\D+') matches = re.search(pattern, a) num = matches.group(0) print num[0] print num[len(num)-1] output
A F
note: the digits are of unknown length
You don't have to use regular expressions, or re at all. Assuming you want just letters to remain, you could do something like this:
a = "A13:F20" a = filter(lambda x: x.isalpha(), a) 
filter(lambda x: x.isnumber(), a). Could you please link to the reference page. Thanks
filter(lambda x: x.isdigit(), a). Here's the reference page.I'd do it like this:
>>> re.findall(r'[a-z]', a, re.IGNORECASE) ['A', 'F'] Use a simple list comprehension, as a filter and get only the alphabets from the actual string.
print [char for char in input_string if char.isalpha()] # ['A', 'F'] You could use re.sub:
>>> a="A13.F20" >>> re.sub(r'[^A-Z]', '', a) # Remove everything apart from A-Z 'AF' >>> re.sub(r'[A-Z]', '', a) # Remove A-Z '13.20' >>> If you're working with strings that all have the same format, you can just cut out substrings:
a="A13:F20" print a[0], a[4] More on python slicing in this answer: Is there a way to substring a string in Python?
