Using named matches from Go regex

Question

I'm coming from Python, so I'm probably just not looking at this the right way. I'd like to create a fairly complicated regex and be able to access the fields match by name. I can't seem to find a good example. The closest I've managed to get is this:

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "regexp"
)

var myExp = regexp.MustCompile(`(?P<first>\d+)\.(\d+).(?P<second>\d+)`)

func main() {
  fmt.Printf("%+v", myExp.FindStringSubmatch("1234.5678.9"))

  match := myExp.FindStringSubmatch("1234.5678.9")
    for i, name := range myExp.SubexpNames() {
        fmt.Printf("'%s'\t %d -> %s\n", name, i, match[i])
    }
    //fmt.Printf("by name: %s %s\n", match["first"], match["second"])
}

The commented out line is how I would expect to access the named fields in Python. What's the equivalent way to do this in go?

Or if I need to convert the match to a map, what's the most idiomatic way in go to make and then access the map?

Answer 1

You can reference your named capture groups by utilizing map as follows:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "regexp"
)

var myExp = regexp.MustCompile(`(?P<first>\d+)\.(\d+).(?P<second>\d+)`)

func main() {
    match := myExp.FindStringSubmatch("1234.5678.9")
    result := make(map[string]string)
    for i, name := range myExp.SubexpNames() {
        if i != 0 && name != "" {
            result[name] = match[i]
        }
    }
    fmt.Printf("by name: %s %s\n", result["first"], result["second"])
}

GoPlay

Answer 2

I don't have the reputation to comment so forgive me if this shouldn't be an 'answer', but I found the above answer helpful so I wrapped it in to a function:

func reSubMatchMap(r *regexp.Regexp, str string) (map[string]string) {
    match := r.FindStringSubmatch(str)
    subMatchMap := make(map[string]string)
    for i, name := range r.SubexpNames() {
        if i != 0 {
            subMatchMap[name] = match[i]
        }
    }

    return subMatchMap
}

Example usage on Playground: https://play.golang.org/p/LPLND6FnTXO

Hope this is helpful to someone else. Love the ease of named capture groups in Go.

Answer 3

The other approaches will throw an error when a match wasn't found for a 'named group'.

The following, however, creates a map with whatever named groups were actually found:

func findNamedMatches(regex *regexp.Regexp, str string) map[string]string {
    match := regex.FindStringSubmatch(str)

    results := map[string]string{}
    for i, name := range match {
        results[regex.SubexpNames()[i]] = name
    }
    return results
}

This approach will just return the map with the named group matches. If there are no matches, it'll just return an empty map. I've found that's much easier to deal with than errors being thrown if a match isn't found.