Regex question

Question

I'm new to regex and need some help. Trying to screen a word a from document. It can begin with or without #, and can end with a symbol like * or !
As an example, the word fun. It should include: Fun, fun, #fun, fun* but should exclude words that has fun in it, like refund, multifunction etc.
This is what I used: (#|)fun($|[^A-Za-z]) It does all of the above but not uppercase Fun. Any suggestions?? Thanks so much in advance!

Answer 1

The purpose is to make the string a raw string. If I didn't do that, I would have to escape , for example, '\s' twice so it would be '\\s' and putting an 'r' at the beggining is way easier

Answer 2

Close, but no need to escape the '!' unless it's a special character

Answer 3

try:

fun_regex = re.compile(r"#*(F|f)un(\*|!)*")
It searches for the words fun or Fun which may or may not start with '#' and may or may not end with '*' or '!'.

EDIT: will also pull '*' and '!' if both are availible in the search

Notice how the check for '*' at the end has to be escaped.

Answer 4

Thanks so much for your reply! I've tried this on https://regexr.com/ but did not work :(

Answer 5

Nah, it still takes words with 'fun' in it, but it's a start!

Answer 6

What is the purpose of r at the beginning?

Answer 7

regex = re.compile(r"\s#*(F|f)un(\*|!|\s)*")

This accounts for the space that should be before "fun" and has room for an optional space at the end

Answer 8

Thanks again. I still can't get it to work at https://regexr.com/ before I use in my program (Java - reading from a file and then screening). Just curious though, if I only care for ! at the end (not ! or *), is it then regex = re.compile(r"\s#(F|f)un(\!|\s)*")?

Answer 9

import re
mystring = "Fun fun! #fun fun* refund multifunction "
pattern = r"(#?[fF]un[*!]?)\s"
print(re.findall(pattern, mystring))

Answer 10

Thanks everyone!