What is the most efficient method to parse this line of text? - regex

Question

The following is a row that I have extracted from the web:
AIG $30 AIG is an international renowned insurance company listed on the NYSE. A period is required. Manual Auto Active 3 0.0510, 0.0500, 0.0300 [EXTRACT]
I will like to create 5 separate variables by parsing the text and retrieving the relevant data. However, i seriously don't understand the REGEX documentation! Can anyone guide me on how i can do it correctly with this example?
Name = AIG
CurrentPrice = $30
Status = Active
World_Ranking = 3
History = 0.0510, 0.0500, 0.0300

Answer 1

Not sure what do you want to achieve here. There's no need to use regexps, you could just use str.split:
>>> str = "AIG $30 AIG is an international renowned insurance company listed on the NYSE. A period is required. Manual Auto Active 3 0.0510, 0.0500, 0.0300 [EXTRACT]"
>>> list = str.split()
>>> dict = { "Name": list[0], "CurrentPrice": list[1], "Status": list[19], "WorldRanking": list[20], "History": ' '.join((list[21], list[22], list[23])) }
#output
>>> dict
{'Status': 'Active', 'CurrentPrice': '$30', 'Name': 'AIG', 'WorldRanking': '3', 'History': '0.0510, 0.0500, 0.0300'}
Instead of using list[19] and so on, you may want to change it to list[-n] to not depend to the company's description length. Like that:
>>> history = ' '.join(list[-4:-1])
>>> history
'0.0510, 0.0500, 0.0300'
For floating history indexes it could be easier to use re:
>>> import re
>>> history = re.findall("\d\.\d{4}", str)
>>> ['0.0510', '0.0500', '0.0300']
For identifying status, you could get the indexes of history values and then substract by one:
>>> [ i for i, substr in enumerate(list) if re.match("\d\.\d{4}", substr) ]
[21, 22, 23]
>>> list[21:24]
['0.0510,', '0.0500,', '0.0300,']
>>> status = list[20]
>>> status
'3'