Regular expression for printing integers within brackets

Question

First time ever using regular expressions and can\'t get it working although there\'s quite a few examples in stackoverflow already.

How can I extract integers which are

Answer 1

If you need to fail the match in [ +-34 ] (i.e. if you needn't extract a negative number if there is a + before it) you will need to use

\[\s*(?:\+|(-))?(\d+)\s*]

and when getting a match, concat the Group 1 and Group 2 values. See this regex demo.

Details

• \[ - a [ char
• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• \+? - an optional + char
• (-?\d+) - Capturing group 1 (the actual output of re.findall): an optional - and 1+ digits
• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• ] - a ] char.

In Python,

import re
text = "dijdi[d43]     d5[55++][ 43]  [+32]dm dij [    -99]x"
numbers_text = [f"{x}{y}" for x, y in re.findall(r'\[\s*(?:\+|(-))?(\d+)\s*]', text)]
numbers = list(map(int, numbers_text))

# => [43, 32, -99] for both