Regexp to find caret preceding integers not working

I’m trying to replace this [^19) Jones, Owen. with this [^19] Jones, Owen. using this regexp statement:

re.sub(r'(?<=\[\^[0-9])(\) )','] ', text)

But no replacement occurs and I’m unable to find the issue. Please help.

>Solution :

You need to use

re.sub(r'(\[\^\d+)\) ', r'\1] ', text)

See the regex demo.

Details:

• (\[\^\d+) – Group 1 (whose value is referred to with \1 from the replacement pattern): [^ and one or more digits
• \) – a ) string.

Note you cannot use a lookbehind here, since \d+ matches a non-fixed amount of digits, and Python re lookbehind requires fixed-width patterns.