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pythonpython-re

Search for WORD at line-start and include all lines before that are not blank

Let's look at this text:

foo bar
foo bar

bar foo

bla
blu
WORD foo bar

foo bar

I'd like to have a python re.search expressions that will match the line starts with WORD and all the non-blank lines before.

So from the text above, it should extract

bla
blu
WORD foo bar

My non-working approach is:

re.search(r'\n\n.*(?!\n\n)WORD.*?\n', text, flags=re.DOTALL)
Solution

  • Found the answer myself:

    re.search(r'\n(.(?!\n\n))*\nWORD.*?\n', text, flags=re.DOTALL)

    Searches for a line starting with WORD and includes that line with all other non-blank lines.