Python regex match OR operator

Question

I'm trying to match time formats in AM or PM.

i.e. 02:40PM
     12:29AM 

I'm using the following regex

timePattern = re.compile('\d{2}:\d{2}(AM|PM)')

but it keeps returning only AM PM string without the numbers. What's going wrong?

Answer 1

Use a non capturing group (?: and reference to the match group.

Use re.I for case insensitive matching.

import re

def find_t(text):
    return re.search(r'\d{2}:\d{2}(?:am|pm)', text, re.I).group()

You can also use re.findall() for recursive matching.

def find_t(text):
    return re.findall(r'\d{2}:\d{2}(?:am|pm)', text, re.I)

See demo