python - Regex Names which have received a B

Question

I have the folllowing lines

John SMith: A
Pedro Smith: B
Jonathan B:  A
John B: B
Luis Diaz: A
Scarlet Diaz: B

I need to get all student names which have received a B.

I tried this but it doesnt work 100%

x = re.findall(r'(.*?)B', grades)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65845296/regex-names-which-have-received-a-b

Answer 1

You can use

([^:
]*):s*B

See the regex demo. Details:

• - a word boundary
• ([^: ]*) - Group 1: any zero or more chars other than : and line feed
• : - a colon
• s* - zero or more whitespaces
• B - a B char.

See the Python demo:

import re
# Make sure you use 
#   with open(fpath, 'r') as f: text = f.read()
# for this to work if you read the data from a file 
text = """John SMith: A
Pedro Smith: B
Jonathan B:  A
John B: B
Luis Diaz: A
Scarlet Diaz: B"""
print( re.findall(r'([^:
]*):s*B', text) )
# => ['Pedro Smith', 'John B', 'Scarlet Diaz']