How to improve my Python regex syntax?

Posted by FarmBoy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by FarmBoy
Published on 2010-03-29T08:45:05Z Indexed on 2010/03/29 9:03 UTC
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I very new to Python, and fairly new to regex. (I have no Perl experience.)

I am able to use regular expressions in a way that works, but I'm not sure that my code is particularly Pythonic or consise.

For example, If I wanted to read in a text file and print out text that appears directly between the words 'foo' and 'bar' in each line (presuming this occurred one or zero times a line) I would write the following:

fileList = open(inFile, 'r')
pattern = re.compile(r'(foo)(.*)(bar)')
for line in fileList:
    result = pattern.search(line)
    if (result != None):
        print result.groups()[1]

Is there a better way? The if is necessary to avoid calling groups() on None. But I suspect there is a more concise way to obtain the matching String when there is one, without throwing errors when there isn't.

I'm not hoping for Perl-like unreadability. I just want to accomplish this common task in the commonest and simplest way.

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