Capture a Repeating Group in Python using RegEx (see example)

I am writing a regular expression in python to capture the contents inside an SSI tag.

I want to parse the tag:

<!--#include file="/var/www/localhost/index.html" set="one" -->

into the following components:

Tag Function (ex: include, echo or set)
Name of attribute, found before the = sign
Value of attribute, found in between the "'s

The problem is that I am at a loss on how to grab these repeating groups, as name/value pairs may occur one or more times in a tag. I have spent hours on this.

Here is my current regex string:

^\<\!\-\-\#([a-z]+?)\s([a-z]*\=\".*\")+? \-\-\>$

It captures the include in the first group and file="/var/www/localhost/index.html" set="one" in the second group, but what I am after is this:

group 1: "include"
group 2: "file"
group 3: "/var/www/localhost/index.html"
group 4 (optional): "set"
group 5 (optional): "one"

(continue for every other name="value" pair)

I am using this site to develop my regex

Solution

Grab everything that can be repeated, then parse them individually. This is probably a good use case for named groups, as well!

import re

data = """<!--#include file="/var/www/localhost/index.html" set="one" reset="two" -->"""
pat = r'''^<!--#([a-z]+) ([a-z]+)="(.*?)" ((?:[a-z]+?=".+")+?) -->'''

result = re.match(pat, data)
result.groups()
('include', 'file', '/var/www/localhost/index.html', 'set="one" reset="two"')

Then iterate through it:

g1, g2, g3, g4 = result.groups()
for keyvalue in g4.split(): # split on whitespace
    key, value = keyvalue.split('=')
    # do something with them