Get block of text in a txt file with regex in Python

user_10629078 0
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I'm just starting with python regular expressions. I read many topics but can't adapt solutions to my problem.

I've got a file like this one : 

**** FILE.NAME ***
Fisrt sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

Second sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

I'm looking for a regex expression to extract several text blocks of my file :

Fisrt sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

Then : 

Second sentence
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla
    blablabla

with a separation of sentences and blabla blocks. I tried something like this but not working : 

^(\w+[^\n]*?)(.*)\n{2}
python regex
2 Answers

General rule of thumb: Don't use re when str methods suffice.

In this case you can call the .split() method on multiple newlines:

s.split('\n\n')

returns

['Fisrt sentence\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla',
 'Second sentence\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla\n    blablabla']
user_19538000

You may use

re.findall(r'^(\w.*)\n([\s\S]*?)(?:\n{2,}|\Z)', text, re.M)

See the regex demo.

The pattern matches:

  • ^ - start of a line (due to re.M, the ^ matches line start positions)
  • (\w.*) - Group 1: aword char followed with any 0+ chars other than line break chars
  • \n - a newline
  • ([\s\S]*?) - Group 2: any 0+ chars, as few as possible
  • (?:\n{2,}|\Z) - either two or more newlines (\n{2,}) or (|) end of string (\Z).
user_38329700
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