Regex to keep one choice in square bracket

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I am trying to write a regex to replace the whole square bracket with the first choice. For example, [ choice A | choice B ] I want to replace the previous square bracket as a whole with choice A. However, when I have more than one of these brackets:

[ choice A | choice B ] and choose between [ choice D | choice F ]

in the same line, all the brackets get replaced by choice A. I know it's because I am selecting [0] in my code, but I don't know how to replace each bracket with its respective choice; namely, choice A and choice D

import re
line = "[ choice A | choice B ] and choose between [ choice D | choice F ]"
x = re.findall( r"\[(.*?)\|", line)[0].strip()
line = re.sub(r"\[(.*?)\]", x,line)
print(line)
python regex
1 Answers

You can use

import re
line = "[ choice A | choice B ] and choose between [ choice D | choice F ]"
line = re.sub(r"\[\s*([^][|]*?)\s*\|[^][]*]", r"\1", line)
print(line) # => choice A and choose between choice D

See the Python demo and the regex demo. The regex matches

  • \[ - a [ char
  • \s* - zero or more whitespaces
  • ([^][|]*?) - Group 1 (\1 in the replacement pattern refers to this value): zero or more chars other than [, ] and |, as few as possible
  • \s*\| - zero or more whitespaces and a | char
  • [^][]* - any zero or more chars other than ] and [
  • ] - a ] char.
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