How to filter out specific strings from a string

Python beginner here. I'm stumped on part of this code for a bot I'm writing.

I am making a reddit bot using Praw to comb through posts and removed a specific set of characters (steam CD keys).

I made a test post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pythonforengineers/comments/91m4l0/testing_my_reddit_scraping_bot/

This should have all the formats of keys.

Currently, my bot is able to find the post using a regex expression. I have these variables:

steamKey15 = (r'wwwww.wwwww.wwwww')
steamKey25 = (r'wwwww.wwwww.wwwww.wwwww.wwwww.')
steamKey17 = (r'wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwsww')


I am finding the text using this:

subreddit = reddit.subreddit('pythonforengineers')
for submission in subreddit.new(limit=20):

if submission.id not in steamKeyPostID:
if re.search(steamKey15, submission.selftext, re.IGNORECASE):
searchLogic()
saveSteamKey()


So this is just to show that the things I should be using in a filter function is a combination of steamKey15/25/17, and submission.selftext.

So here is the part where I am confused. I cant find a function that works, or is doing what I want. My goal is to remove all the text from submission.selftext(the body of the post) BUT the keys, which will eventually be saved in a .txt file.

Any advice on a good way to go around this? I've looked into re.sub and .translate but I don't understand how the parts fit together.

I am using Python 3.7 if it helps.

2 Answers
2

can't you just get the regexp results?

m = re.search(steamKey15, submission.selftext, re.IGNORECASE)
if m:
print(m.group(0))


Also note that a dot . means any char in a regexp. If you want to match only dots, you should use .. You can probably write your regexp like this instead:

.

.

r'w{5}[-.]w{5}[-.]w{5}'


This will match the key when separated by . or by -.

.

-

Another hint is to use re.findall instead of re.search - some posts contain more than one steam key in the same post! findall will return all matches while search only returns the first one.

re.findall

re.search

findall

search

So a couple things first . means any character in regex. I think you know that, but just to be sure. Also wwwww can be replaced with w{5,5} where this specifies greedily anywhere between 5 and 5 words. I would use re.findall.

.

wwwww

w{5,5}

re.findall

import re
steamKey15 = (r'(?:w{5,5}.){2,2}w{5,5}')
steamKey25 = (r'(?:w{5,5}.){5,5}')
steamKey17 = (r'w{15,15}sww')
finds_15 = re.findall(steamKey15, txt)
finds_25 = re.findall(steamKey25, txt)
finds_17 = re.findall(steamKey17, txt)


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