I have regex which prints between parenthesis, infact I need only specific parenthesis, i mean

car(skoda,audi)
bike(hayabusa)

I get output as: skoda audi hayabusa

To get the cars and bikes in parenthesis I used: (r'^(\S+)\((.*)\)$')

But i need to get only cars in 'car(...)' specifically, what to do?

I tried something like: (r'^car(\S+)\((.*)\)$')

and i need only skoda,audi not hayabusa

I dont get output

Coding to use:

class Group:
    def __init__(self):
        self.members = []
        self.text = []

with open('text1.txt') as f:
    groups = collections.defaultdict(Group)
    group_pattern = re.compile(r'^(\S+)\((.*)\)$')  #<=here i am using
    current_group = None

    for line in f:
        line = line.strip()
        m = group_pattern.match(line)
        if m:    # this is a group definition line
            group_name, group_members = m.groups()
            groups[group_name].members.extend(group_members.split(','))
            current_group = group_name
        else:
            if (current_group is not None) and (len(line) > 0):
                groups[current_group].text.append(line)

for group_name, group in groups.items():
    print "%s(%s)" % (group_name, ','.join(group.members))
    print '\n'.join(group.text)

What's wrong with your code?

^car(\S+)\((.*)\)$

The reason why your code matches the expected strings are,

• You need to change (\S+) to (\S*) because \S+ does a greedy match.That is it matches upto the last. so no capturing will occur.

Finally your regex would be,

^car(\S*)\((.*)\)$

Get your string which was present inside the group index 2.

>>> import re
>>> s = """car(skoda,audi)
... bike(hayabusa)"""
>>> regex = re.compile(r'^car\S*\((.*)\)$', re.M)
>>> m = regex.findall(s)
>>> m
['skoda,audi']

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