How to make Regex choose words separately

Question

So I have this string:

sockcooker!~shaz@Rizon-AC7BDF2F.dynamic.dsl.as9105.com !~shaz@ PRIVMSG #Rizon :ohai. New here. registered 10 mins ago, have not got an ema         


        

Answer 1

You want to use an ungreedy match. There are two ways (and python supports both). The latter is more flexible:

r"![^@]+"
r"!.+?@

The ? makes the .+ ungreedy, so it will stop at the first "@" instead of the last.

Answer 2

By default, quantifiers are greedy in nature in the sense, they will try to match as much as they can. That is why your regex is matching till the last @.

You can use reluctant quantifier (add a ? after the +) to stop at the first @:

r"!.+?@"

Or you can also use negated character class, which will automatically stop at the first @:

r"![^@]+"

Choose whatever is easier to understand for you.