python findall finds only the last occurrence

Question

I'm trying to extract some data from webpage using Python 2.7.5. code: ``` p = re.compile(r'.*(.+).*') str = 'df

2

fdd

4

fd' m = p.findall(str) for eachentry in m: print 'id=[{}], text=[{}]'.format(eachentry[0], eachentry[1]) ``` output: ``` id=[3], text=[4] ``` why it's extracting only the last occurrence? if i remove the last occurrence the first one is found

Accepted Answer

The `.*` at the beginning is very greedy and it consumes till the last occurrence. In fact all the `.*` in the expression are very greedy. So, we make them non-greedy with `?`, like this ``` p = re.compile(r'.*?(.+?).*?') ``` And the output becomes ``` id=[1], text=[2] id=[3], text=[4] ``` In fact, you can drop the first and last `.*` patterns and keep it simple like this ``` p = re.compile(r'(.+?)') ```

python findall finds only the last occurrence

Solution

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