Regular expressions, help?

[Sania]

On Apr 19, 2:48 am, Jussi Piitulainen <jpiit... at ling.helsinki.fi>
wrote:
> Sania writes:
> > So I am trying to get the number of casualties in a text. After 'death
> > toll' in the text the number I need is presented as you can see from
> > the variable called text. Here is my code
> > I'm pretty sure my regex is correct, I think it's the group part
> > that's the problem.
> > I am using nltk by python. Group grabs the string in parenthesis and
> > stores it in deadnum and I make deadnum into a list.
>
> >  text="accounts put the death toll at 637 and those missing at
> > 653 , but the total number is likely to be much bigger"
> >       dead=re.match(r".*death toll.*(\d[,\d\.]*)", text)
> >       deadnum=dead.group(1)
> >       deaths.append(deadnum)
> >       print deaths
>
> It's the regexp. The .* after "death toll" each the input as far as it
> can without making the whole match fail. The group matches only the
> last digit in the text.
>
> You could allow only non-digits before the number. Or you could look
> up the variant of * that only matches as much as it must.

Hey Thanks,
So now my regex is

    dead=re.match(r".*death toll.{0,20}(\d[,\d\.]*)", text)

But I only find 7 not 657. How is it that the group is only matching
the last digit? The whole thing is parenthesis not just the last
part. ?