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Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 Pointstwitters
This is telling me that it is not working because it returns @kennethlove. but since that is a twitter address for the first person, I do not understand what the problem is. Also, I do not understand why this needs re.M, when the previous challenge did not.
import re
string = '''Love, Kenneth, kenneth+challenge@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5555, @kennethlove
Chalkley, Andrew, andrew@teamtreehouse.co.uk, 555-555-5556, @chalkers
McFarland, Dave, dave.mcfarland@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5557, @davemcfarland
Kesten, Joy, joy@teamtreehouse.com, 555-555-5558, @joykesten'''
contacts = re.search(r'(?P<email>[\w+.]+@[\w.]+),\s(?P<phone>\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4})',string)
twitters = re.search(r'\s@[\w\d]+',string,re.M)
5 Answers
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherIt needs re.M because the pattern should show that it's at the end of the line. You don't need to catch the space and you need a $ at the end to show end-of-line.
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 Pointsok, so I get that re.M turns the entire file into a bunch of strings for each line, and the ^$ is needed to tell it where the starting string begins and ends, but I guess I missed that re.M only tells the pattern to look at the end of the line. Looking back at the examples in the video, they looked at the whole line. So if there were multiple twitter addresses in each line, this code would only pull out the last one?
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsWhat I got from playing around with your example in groups was that without ^$re.M, the search doesn't know when one line ends and another begins, so results get funky.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherNo, you're correct that re.M finds each line in the string as its own string (effectively). Your pattern, though, will catch @kennethlove, not just @kennethlove.
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsThe first twitters below will print out @teamtree.....etc, but the second returns empty.
twitters = re.search(r'@[\w]+', string) print(twitters) twitters = re.search(r'^@[\w]+$', string, re.M) print(twitters)
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherRight. The first finds the first @ it can, which will be in an email address. Not what we want.
The second looks for an @ at the start of a string, which doesn't exist.
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsI am sorry, I don't get why my second re looks for the @ at the start of the line.
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherBecause of the ^.
twitters = re.search(r'''^ # at the start of the line
@[\w]+ # look for @ followed by 1 or more consecutive word characters
$ # until you get to the end of the line
''', string, re.M|re.VERBOSE)
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsOk, so your code above says that it keeps looking for the @[\w]+ until it gets to the end of the line. So I don't understand why my code didn't find anything. The only difference between your code and mine is that you wrote yours over several lines, hence the extra '' at the start and end of the string, and the re.VERBOSE flag. Correct? And I don't need those things if I am going to write the code in one line, correct?
Thanks for your help! Hey it looks like the teacher needs some more points! There are lots of people beating you on here!
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherYour code and my code are exactly the same except for the verbose flag and the multiple lines. Yours didn't find anything because it says the line has to start with ^, and none of the lines start with that. It also says there can't be anything but @ and word characters (no spaces) all the way until the end of the line. Again, this doesn't match any of our lines.
Your code is actually fine with one change. Delete the ^. That way it'll only find the @ and word characters that are at the end of the line.
As for points, I'm not really concerned about them. I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. ;)
Elizabeth McInerney
3,175 PointsHah! Yes, you do! I was just joking with you :-)