Regex for "a:b"

Question

Been working at this a bit, trying to figure it out for myself. Basically I'm taking user input, that can have a keyword/value structure like so:
Blah abc:def lah:123!dfj blah:22:34
which should end up being
('abc', 'def', 'lah':'123!dfj', 'blah':'22:34')

Currently I have (.[^: ]+):(.[^ ]+), but that's only getting the first value. Am I missing something obvious here?

Answer 1

You can't expect to get more than a single pair from the regular expression, because there's now way for a set of parentheses to return multiple matches. Even if you do something like (([^:]+):([^ ]+) ?)* (which will match your string), the inner set of parentheses will return only one match (the last one).

If you want to get more pairs, you don't do it by changing the regular expression, you do it by taking a function that applies your regular expression multiple times to find all of the matches, like scan in Ruby.