Regular expression to match a dot

Question

Was wondering what the best way is to match \"test.this\" from \"blah blah blah test.this@gmail.com blah blah\" is? Using Python.

I\'ve tri

Answer 1

In your regex you need to escape the dot "\." or use it inside a character class "[.]", as it is a meta-character in regex, which matches any character.

Also, you need \w+ instead of \w to match one or more word characters.

---

Now, if you want the test.this content, then split is not what you need. split will split your string around the test.this. For example:

>>> re.split(r"\b\w+\.\w+@", s)
['blah blah blah ', 'gmail.com blah blah']

---

You can use re.findall:

>>> re.findall(r'\w+[.]\w+(?=@)', s)   # look ahead
['test.this']
>>> re.findall(r'(\w+[.]\w+)@', s)     # capture group
['test.this']