Regex: Repeated capturing groups

Question

I have to parse some tables from an ASCII text file. Here\'s a partial sample:

QSMDRYCELL   11.00   11.10   11.00   11.00    -.90      11     11000     1.212         


        

Answer 1

Unfortunately you need to repeat the (…) 8 times to get each column separately.

^(\S+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)\s+([-.\d]+)$

If code is possible, you can first match those numeric columns as a whole

>>> rx1 = re.compile(r'^(\S+)\s+((?:[-.\d]+\s+){7}[-.\d]+)$', re.M)
>>> allres = rx1.findall(theAsciiText)

then split the columns by spaces

>>> [[p] + q.split() for p, q in allres]