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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Groups

Posted by Jeremy Settlemyer
Jeremy Settlemyer
4,149 Points

Getting no return value when doing the search

I swear I have copied it letter for letter as in the video. When running this in workspaces there are two different issues that I receive.

Here is a copy of the code I used.

import re

names_file = open("names.txt", encoding="utf-8")
data = names_file.read()
names_file.close()


line = re.search(r'''
  ^(?P<name>[-\w ]*,\s[-\w ]+) # first and last name
  (?P<email>]-\w\d.+]+@[-\w\d.]+)\t # email
  (?P<phone>\(?\d{3}\)?-?\s?\d{3}-\d{4})?\t # phone
  (?P<job>[\w\s]+,\s[\w\s.]+)\t? # job and company
  (?P<twitter>@[\w\d]+)?$ #Twitter
''', data, re.X| re.M)

print(line)
print(line.groupdict())

When the print(line.groupdict()) is not commented out. I receive an error stating:

AttributeError: 'None type' object has no attribute 'groupdict'

With that line commented out I receive the value of "None" in which in the video has a value returned.

Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong.

Thank you.

2 Answers

Kenneth Love
STAFF
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

Look at your < email> line. Your first set starts with ] instead of [. Also, you probably don't want the space between the pipe | and re.M.

Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

There may be some other problems, but I don't see any from a quick glance.

Amien Phillips
Amien Phillips
3,175 Points
Amien Phillips
Amien Phillips
3,175 Points

Also you missed a \t at the end of the < name> line

Rabih Atallah
Rabih Atallah
3,405 Points
Rabih Atallah
Rabih Atallah
3,405 Points

I think Jeremy is right on the : print(line.groupdict()) it returns AttributeError

Amien Phillips
Amien Phillips
3,175 Points

I presume line doesn't have .groupdict() attribute because it's not a dictionary, and it's not a dictionary because the match failed, and the match failed because of the missing \t

but I may be wrong, try the \t at the end of the < name> line and see