regular expression not giving complete match

Question

I am trying to find this in the string with regex.

  : [J, BASIC]
  ? [CINTERMEDIATE]
  : [D,MEDIUM]

the first character can be either ':' or '?' then there is a white-space,then square brackets within the square brackets there is two text block separated by a comma and/or white space. the comma or white space may or may not be present

Here is what i have written to find this

regex = re.compile('[:|?\s[\w[,\s]?\w]]+')

but it finds only

'C]'
'E]'
'M]'

Answer 1

Your regex is not handling ['s as literals.. they are taken as special characters (character set)

You can use the following:

[:?]\s*\[\w+(\s*,\s*)?\w+\]

Explanation:

• [:?] the first character can be either ':' or '?'
• \s*\[ then there is a white-space,then square brackets
• \w+(\s*,\s*)?\w+ within the square brackets there is two text block separated by a comma and/or white space (with optional comma and space)
• \] close bracket

See DEMO

Edit: If you want to capture the match you can use :

([:?]\s*\[\w+(?:\s*,\s*)?\w+\])