Regular expressions, help?

[Sania]

On Apr 19, 9:52 am, Jon Clements <jon... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, 19 April 2012 07:11:54 UTC+1, Sania  wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 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
>
> > Any help would be appreciated,
> > Thank you,
> > Sania
>
> Or just don't fully rely on a regex. I would, for time, and the little sanity I believe I have left, would just do something like:
>
> death_toll = re.search(r'death toll.*\d+', text).group().rsplit(' ', 1)[1]
>
> hth,
>
> Jon.

Thank you all so much!

I ended up using Jussi's advice.....  \D{0,20}
Azrazer what you suggested works but I need to make sure that it
catches numbers like 6,370 as well as 637. And I tried tweaking the
regex around from the one you said in your reply but It didn't work
(probably would have if I was more adept). But thanks!

Jon- I kind of see what you are doing. In the regex you say that after
death toll there can be 0 or more characters followed by 1 or more
digits (although I would need to add a comma within digit so it
catches 6,370). I can also see that you are splitting each string but
I don't understand the 1 in rsplit(' ', 1)[1]. I am not really
familiar with the syntax I guess.

Thanks again!