Python regex to find all case of curly brackets, inclusive of brackets

Question

I would to like find and replace strings within double curly brackets, inclusive of the brackets themselves.

For example:

<a href="#">{{hello}}</a>

should ideally return:

{{hello}}

I found this expression: {{(.*?)}} here

However this only returns text between the brackets. Ie. With this expression, the example above would return: "hello", rather than "{{hello}}"

Answer 1

I'm assuming you're using re.findall() which only returns the contents of capturing groups, if they are present in the regex.

Since you don't want them, just remove the capturing parentheses:

matches = re.findall("{{.*?}}", mystring)

When using re.sub() for replacing, the original regex will work just fine.