regex excluding time from text

Question

I would like to extract time from the text below using regex.

Text: "Media: a few minutes ago, 3:25 pm uts"

Regex pattern to select only time (ex: 3:25) from the above text?

Answer 1

Use regex /\b[0-9]+:[0-9]+\b/. Explanation:

• \b - word boundary
• [0-9]+ - 1+ digits
• : - literal colon
• [0-9]+ - 1+ digits
• \b - word boundary

I do not know your specific use in selenium, but here is an example:

src = 'Media: a few minutes ago, 3:25 pm uts'
pattern = re.compile(r'(\\b[0-9]+:[0-9]+\\b)')
match = pattern.search(src)
print match.groups()[0]

Output:

3:25