PYTHON - Capture contents inside curly braces

Question

So, as part of my application, i need it to read data from a text file, and get elements between curly brackets.

e.g:

Server_1 {

Answer 1

You can try with this:

\{(.*?)\}

Explanation

1. \{ matches the character { literally (case sensitive)
2. (.*?) 1st Capturing Group
3. .*? matches any character
4. *? Quantifier — Matches between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy)
5. \} matches the character } literally (case sensitive)

Sample Code to extract content inside curly bracket:

 import re

regex = r"\{(.*?)\}"

test_str = ("Server_1 {\n"
    "/directory1 /directory2\n\n"
    "}\n"
    "Server_2 {\n\n"
    "/directory1\n\n"
    "/directory2\n\n"
    "}")

matches = re.finditer(regex, test_str, re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)

for matchNum, match in enumerate(matches):
    for groupNum in range(0, len(match.groups())):
        print (match.group(1))

Run the code here

Answer 2

If you also want to extract the server name, you can try with this:

fullConfig = """
Server_1 {
  /directory1 /directory2
}

Server_2  {
  /directory1
  /directory2
}
"""

# OUTPUT
# ('Server_1', '/directory1 /directory2\n')
# ('Server_2', '/directory1\n  /directory2\n')
regex = r'(\w+)\s*[^{]*{\s*([^}]+)\s*}'
for serverName, serverConfig in re.findall(regex, fullConfig):
  print(serverName, serverConfig)