How to match number followed by . and a space character?

Question

Basically I have some text like this:

1. first line
2. second
3. more lines
4. bullet points

I separate these line by line so I can process them, but I want to be able to see if a line actually starts with a number then a . and then a space character.

So I can use this so split the line into 2 and process each of these separately. The number part with the . and space will be treated differently than the rest.

What's the best way to do this in Python? I didn't want to do a simple number check as characters because the numbers can be anything but likely less than 100.

Answer 1

The following should get you the two parts (number + full stop) and (everything after space) into two capture groups.

import re


def get_number_full_stop(input_string: str):
    res = re.search("^(\d+\.)\s(.+)", input_string)
    if res:
        return res.groups()
    else:
        return None


print(get_number_full_stop("1. hello"))
print(get_number_full_stop("1.hello"))