How to combine multiple regular expressions into one line?

Question

My script works fine doing this:

images = re.findall(\"src.\\\"(\\S*?media.tumblr\\S*?tumblr_\\S*?jpg)\", doc)
videos = re.findall(\"\\S*?(http\\S*?video_file\\S         


        

Answer 1

If you really want efficient...

For starters, I would cut out the \S*? in the second regex. It serves no purpose apart from an opportunity for lots of backtracking.

src.\"(\S*?media.tumblr\S*?tumblr_\S*?jpg)|(http\S*?video_file\S*?tumblr_[a-zA-Z0-9]*)

Other ideas

You can get rid of the capture groups by using a small lookbehind in the first one, allowing you to get rid of all parentheses and directly matching what you want. Not faster, but tidier:

(?<=src.\")\S*?media.tumblr\S*?tumblr_\S*?jpg|http\S*?video_file\S*?tumblr_[a-zA-Z0-9]*

Do you intend for the periods after src and media to mean "any character", or to mean "a literal period"? If the latter, escape them: \.

You can use the re.IGNORECASE option and get rid of some letters:

(?<=src.\")\S*?media.tumblr\S*?tumblr_\S*?jpg|http\S*?video_file\S*?tumblr_[a-z0-9]*

Answer 2

As mentioned in the comments, a pipe (|) should do the trick.

The regular expression

(src.\"(\S*?media.tumblr\S*?tumblr_\S*?jpg))|(\S*?(http\S*?video_file\S*?tumblr_[a-zA-Z0-9]*))

catches either of the two patterns.

Demo on Regex Tester