python - What should be the regex expresesion?

Question

I am trying to separate the time from AM in a string. The code

content= "11:20pm"
content = re.findall(r"[^Wd_]+|d+", content)
print(content)

I expect ['11:20','pm'] but with my code I get ['11','20','pm'] What should I do?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66051771/what-should-be-the-regex-expresesion

Answer 1

You may match the time by adding (?::d+)? pattern to the d+ alternative:

content= "11:20pm"
content = re.findall(r"[^Wd_]+|d+(?::d+)?", content)
print(content) # => ['11:20', 'pm']

See the Python demo and the regex demo.

Note you might want to extend the pattern to also match float values, and if yes, you would need to use r"[^Wd_]+|d+(?:[:.]d+)?".

Details:

• [^Wd_]+ - one or more letters
• | - or
• d+ - one or more digits
• (?::d+)? - an optional sequence of a `:~ and one or more digits.