How to match alternatives with python regex

Question

given string 1:

\'\'\'TOM likes to go swimming MARY loves to go to the playground JANE likes going shopping\'\'\'

I want to capture the text between only 2 name

Answer 1

You need to fix your alternation, it must be enclosed with a non-capturing group (?:JANE|MARY), and use a lazy quantifier with [\w\W] (that I would replace with .* and use re.DOTALL modifier to make the dot to also match line breaks):

(?s)TOM\s*(.+?)\s*(?:JANE|MARY)

See the regex demo

Without the (?:...|...), your regex matched Tom, then any 1+ chars as many as possible (that is, the regex grabbed the whole string, and then backtracked to match the last occurrence of the subsequent subpattern, JANE) and JANE, or MARY substring. Now, the fixed regex matches:

• (?s) - DOTALL inline modifier
• TOM - a literal char sequence
• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• (.+?) - Group 1 (capturing): any 1+ chars, as few as possible, up to the first occurrence of the subsequent subpatterns....
• \s* - 0+ whitespaces
• (?:JANE|MARY) - either JANE or MARY substring.