How could I find all instances of a substring in a string?
For example I have the string ("%1 is going to the %2 with %3"). I need to extract all placeholders in this string (%1, %2, %3)
The current code could only find the first two because the ending is not a white space.
import re
string = "%1 is going to the %2 with %3"
r = re.compile('%(.*?) ')
m = r.finditer(string)
for y in m:
print (y.group())
Don't match on whitespace, match on a word boundary instead using \b:
r = re.compile(r'%(.*?)\b')
You may want to restrict your characters to word characters only instead of the . wildcard, and match at least one character:
r = re.compile(r'%(\w+)\b')
You don't appear to be using the capturing group either, so you could just omit that:
r = re.compile(r'%\w+\b')
%: r'%(\w+)%'.
\w) for obvious reasons.r'(?P<meta>(%|%%|$|$$)\w+(?P=meta)' would match one of 4 different meta characters, provided that the same meta character(s) are used after the name as well.