Help for a complex RE

[Peter Otten]

Sergio Spina wrote:

> I know about greedy and not-greedy, but the problem remains.

This makes me wonder why you had to ask

>>> Why the regex engine stops the search at last piece of string?
>>> Why not at the first match of the group "@:"?

To make it crystal clear this time:

>>> import re
>>> 
>>> patt = r"""  # the match pattern is:
... .+?         # one or more characters
... [ ]         # followed by a space
... (?=[@#D]:)  # that is followed by one of the
...             # chars "@#D" and a colon ":"
... """
>>> pattern = re.compile(patt, re.VERBOSE)
>>> m = pattern.match("Jun at i Bun#i @:Janji D:Banji #:Junji")
>>> m.group()
'Jun at i Bun#i '

That's exactly what you asked for in

>>> What can it be a regex pattern with the following result?
>>> 
>>>> In [1]: m = pattern.match("Jun at i Bun#i @:Janji D:Banji #:Junji")
>>>> 
>>>> In [2]: m.group()
>>>> Out[2]: 'Jun at i Bun#i '