Python: Saving regular expression results in variables directly

Python Regular expressions has a powerful tools under it's regular expressions module which lets you create variables and save your search results directly.

It is called named groups . When you search for something and you want to save it in a variable when found, this is what you should use.

Regular Expressions: Look ahead and Look behind

Regular expressions are fun. There are two important concepts that are quite often sought for. Find something based on content that follows our search pattern . OR. Find something based on content that lies ahead. Let's see some examples to see what I mean.

LOOK AHEAD

LOOK AHEAD means , I want to see what lies ahead first, and then decide, to do something now.

Syntax of regex pattern:  pattern1(?=pattern2)

Regular Expressions. Lets not be greedy.

Recently faced a situation when I wanted to extracted parts of a html code. But then I realized, I have no control over the amount of information regex is giving me back.

Nose test command line tricks

If you are using nose plugin to run your tests , there are some handy tricks that we can use while running tests.

Run test and generate a XML report:

nosetests --with-xunit test_folder --xunit-file=nosetests_test_results.xml