How to use backslash in regex patterns?

Question

Simple regex task: find an ID (and language) within a string.

import re

txt = '<OB02 ID="1099367" LANG="FR">'
pattern = r'\\ID="(.*?)\\"'

result = re.findall(pattern, txt)

This gives an empty list as result. Leading to the questions:

• How to correctly encapsulate \" in python?
• How to extract ID and LANG from txt?

Answer 1

Use an xmlParser to parse xml and not regex.

As a workaround you can use the following regex:

import re

txt = '<OB02 ID="1099367" LANG="FR">'
pattern = 'ID="([^"]*)'

result = re.findall(pattern, txt)

As said, this is a bad idea, caus if someone now starts using single quotes or add comments, this will break.