I have been trying to figure this one out but since I am a neewby at regex I haven't been able. I need to select the right lines of some telnet output which looks like the following:
systemstatus get resume # line to exclude
systemstatus get idle # line to filter
systemstatus get talking # line to filter
systemstatus get ringing # line to filter
systemstatus get outgoing # line to filter
systemstatus get sleeping # line to filter
As you can see I need to exclude the one with resume and select all others. So I know I could filter by length but I only know how to filter by length bigger than something but not by many lengths. For example: "systemstatus get \w{7,}" would exclude the resume line but also the idle line. So actually I need something that filters lengths of 4, 7 and 8.
Does anyone knows how to do this?
Note: this must be done in regex because of telnet library.
Note2: Since it is telnet, I have to keep reading when the systemstatus get resume appears (that's what I mean by "excluding") and not stop as I would do when a systemstatus get idle comes in. So filtering by "systemstatus get WHATEVER" and then exluding "resume" would stop reading when "resume" comes in. I am using telnet.expect([], timeout) of the telnet lib.
Option 1
Call re.findall with the re.MULTILINE switch.
matches = re.findall(r"systemstatus get \b(?:\w{4}|\w{7,8})\b", t, re.M)
Which returns each match as a list of strings.
Regex Details
systemstatus get # literals
\b # word boundary
(?: # non-capturing group
\w{4} # find a word of size 4
| # regex OR pipe
\w{7,8} # find a word of size 7 or 8
)
\b
We're matching by word size here because of your requirement -
I need something that filters lengths of 4, 7 and 8.
Option 2
Split your multiline string into separate lines, iterate over each line and call re.match on each one -
matches = []
for line in t.splitlines():
if re.match(r"systemstatus get \b(?:\w{4}|\w{7,8})\b", line):
matches.append(line)