Regular expression to extract the year from a string

Question

This should be simple but i cant seem to get it going. The purpose of it is to extract v3 tags from mp3 file names in Mp3tag.

I have these strings I want to extract

Answer 1

You're almost there with your regular expression.

What you really need is:

\s\((\d{4})\)$

Where:

• \s is some whitespace
• \( is a literal '('
• ( is the start of the match group
• \d is a digit
• {4} means four of the previous atom (i.e. four digits)
• ) is the end of the match group
• \) is a literal ')'
• $ is the end of the string

For best results, put into a function:

>>> def get_year(name):
...     return re.search('\s\((\d{4})\)$', name).groups()[0]
... 
>>> for name in "Test String 1 (1994)", "34 Test String 2 (1995)", "Test (String) 3 (1996)":
...     print get_year(name)
... 
1994
1995
1996