python regex to get all text until a (, and get text inside brackets

Question

I need help with two regex operations.

1. Get all text until an open bracket.

   e.g. 'this is so cool (234)' => 'this is so cool'

2. Get the text inside the brackets, so the number '234'

Answer 1

Up until the paren: regex = re.compile("(.*?)\s*\(")

Inside the first set of parens: regex = re.compile(".*?\((.*?)\)")

Edit: Single regex version: regex = re.compile("(.*?)\s*\((.*?)\)")

Example output:

>>> import re
>>> r1 = re.compile("(.*?)\s*\(")
>>> r2 = re.compile(".*?\((.*?)\)")
>>> text = "this is so cool (234)"
>>> m1 = r1.match(text)
>>> m1.group(1)
'this is so cool'
>>> m2 = r2.match(text)
>>> m2.group(1)
'234'
>>> r3 = re.compile("(.*?)\s*\((.*?)\)")
>>> m3 = r3.match(text)
>>> m3.group(1)
'this is so cool'
>>> m3.group(2)
'234'
>>> 

Note of course that this won't work right with multiple sets of parens, as it's only expecting one parenthesized block of text (as per your example). The language of matching opening/closing parens of arbitrary recurrence is not regular.