Python regex findall

by 
import re
regex = ur"\[P\] (.+?) \[/P\]+?"
line = "President [P] Barack Obama [/P] met Microsoft founder [P] Bill Gates [/P], yesterday."
person = re.findall(regex, line)
print(person)

yields

['Barack Obama', 'Bill Gates']

The regex ur"[\u005B1P\u005D.+?\u005B\u002FP\u005D]+?" is exactly the same
unicode as u'[[1P].+?[/P]]+?' except harder to read.

The first bracketed group [[1P] tells re that any of the characters in the list ['[', '1', 'P'] should match, and similarly with the second bracketed group [/P]].That’s not what you want at all. So,

  • Remove the outer enclosing square brackets. (Also remove the
    stray 1 in front of P.)
  • To protect the literal brackets in [P], escape the brackets with a
    backslash: \[P\].
  • To return only the words inside the tags, place grouping parentheses
    around .+?.

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