Data Nitro and regular expression (Python)

Question

I have this column in MS Excel 2010 - which has a combination of 'zip code' and 'email-ids'

I am trying to extract these zip-codes(20530, 90012-3308 etc.) from this column.

    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20004 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    90012-3308  [email protected]
    90012-3308  [email protected]
    90012 [email protected]

I tried Python's re module.

import re


for i in range(1, 9):
     Cell(i, 4).value = re.findall(r'\d+', Cell(i, 1).value) #storing result in column4

I ran the regex on that column and I got this result:

[u'20530']
[u'20530']
[u'20530']
[u'20530']
[u'20004', u'9']
[u'20530', u'8']
[u'90012', u'3308']
[u'90012', u'3308']
[u'90012']

How can I extract the results, into the human readable zip-code form?

Answer 1

Why can't you just split?

>>> '20530 [email protected]'.split()
['20530', '[email protected]']

Then just grab the first element.

>>> '20530 [email protected]'.split()[0]
'20530'

For all your data:

l = ['20530 [email protected]',
     '20530 [email protected]',
     '20530 [email protected]',
     '20530 [email protected]',
     '20004 [email protected]',
     '20530 [email protected]',
     '90012-3308  [email protected]',
     '90012-3308  [email protected]',
     '90012 [email protected]']

[entry.split()[0] for entry in l]

Result

['20530', '20530', '20530', '20530', '20004', '20530', '90012-3308', '90012-3308', '90012']

Answer 2

The following regular expression will match each string and extract the postal code as group 1:

([\d\-]+)\s+[\w@\.]+

Here's the Python code to extract all of the postal codes at once:

import re
text = r'''    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    20004 [email protected]
    20530 [email protected]
    90012-3308  [email protected]
    90012-3308  [email protected]
    90012 [email protected]'''
re.compile(r'([\d\-]+)\s+[\w@\.]+').findall(text)