matching exactly a 4 digit number in python

[John Machin]

On Nov 22, 8:46 am, harijay <hari... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
> I am a few months new into python. I have used regexps before in perl
> and java but am a little confused with this problem.
>
> I want to parse a number of strings and extract only those that
> contain a 4 digit number anywhere inside a string
>
> However the regexp
> p = re.compile(r'\d{4}')
>
> Matches even sentences that have longer than 4 numbers inside
> strings ..for example it matches "I have 3324234 and more"

No it doesn't. When used with re.search on that string it matches
3324, it doesn't "match" the whole sentence.

>
> I am very confused. Shouldnt the \d{4,} match exactly four digit
> numbers so a 5 digit number sentence should not be matched .

{4} does NOT mean the same as {4,}.
{4} is the same as {4,4}
{4,} means {4,INFINITY}

Ignoring {4,}:

You need to specify a regex that says "4 digits followed by (non-digit
or end-of-string)". Have a try at that and come back here if you have
any more problems.

some test data:
xxx1234
xxx12345
xxx1234xxx
xxx12345xxx
xxx1234xxx1235xxx
xxx12345xxx1234xxx