I have the following code to match the dates
import re date_reg_exp2 = re.compile(r'\d{2}([-/.])(\d{2}|[a-zA-Z]{3})\1(\d{4}|\d{2})|\w{3}\s\d{2}[,.]\s\d{4}') matches_list = date_reg_exp2.findall("23-SEP-2015 and 23-09-2015 and 23-09-15 and Sep 23, 2015") print matches_list The output I expect is
["23-SEP-2015","23-09-2015","23-09-15","Sep 23, 2015"] What I am getting is:
[('-', 'SEP', '2015'), ('-', '09', '2015'), ('-', '09', '15'), ('', '', '')] Please check the link for regex here.
The problem you have is that re.findall returns captured texts only excluding Group 0 (the whole match). Since you need the whole match (Group 0), you just need to use re.finditer and grab the group() value:
matches_list = [x.group() for x in date_reg_exp2.finditer("23-SEP-2015 and 23-09-2015 and 23-09-15 and Sep 23, 2015")] See IDEONE demo
re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0)
Return all non-overlapping matches of pattern in string, as a list of strings... If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.
re.finditer(pattern, string, flags=0)
Return an iterator yieldingMatchObjectinstances over all non-overlapping matches for the RE pattern in string.
You could try this regex
date_reg_exp2 = re.compile(r'(\d{2}(/|-|\.)\w{3}(/|-|\.)\d{4})|([a-zA-Z]{3}\s\d{2}(,|-|\.|,)?\s\d{4})|(\d{2}(/|-|\.)\d{2}(/|-|\.)\d+)') Then use re.finditer()
for m in re.finditer(date_reg_exp2,"23-SEP-2015 and 23-09-2015 and 23-09-15 and Sep 23, 2015"): print m.group() The Output will be
23-SEP-2015
23-09-2015
23-09-15
Sep 23, 2015
55.123.4567. Also / says "Unescaped Forward Slash". So I guess you need to use \/.
. does not occur in your dates so that need not be included in the regex and for / you can use \/. doesn't occur but in real-time cases a lot of . occur (atleast in my case).dd-mm-yyyy dd/mm/yyyy dd.mm.yyyy dd-mon-yyyy dd/mon/yyyy dd.mon.yyyy Mon dd, yyyy Mon dd. yyyytry this
# The first (\d{2}-([A-Z]{3}|\d{2})-(\d{4}|\d{2})) group tries to match the first three types of dates # rest will match the last type dates = "23-SEP-2015 and 23-09-2015 and 23-09-15 and Sep 23, 2015" for x in re.finditer('((\d{2}-([A-Z]{3}|\d{2})-(\d{4}|\d{2}))|([a-zA-Z]{3}\s\d{1,2},\s\d{4}))', dates): print x.group(1) 
(may be in the wrong place - the first two numbers are not captured, the first thing you've told it to capture is the[-/.]sequence"23-SEP-2015 and 23-09-2015 and 23-09-15 and Sep 23, 2015".split(' and ')in this case?and. It can beThis string is 23-09-2015 and It can also be something. I need a match saying['23-09-2015']regexIf you can help me with the above expression that would be great.