Use regex to extract recepient and sender from an email text in python

I am learning regular expressions and am getting pretty frustrated with this. I have the following text:

From: sender name
To: the recepient
Subject: well done!
Body: lorem ipsum lorem ipsum

I am trying to extract the text in the lines "From" and "To". I wrote the following regex:

(^From: [a-zA-Z]*)+|(^To: [a-zA-Z]*)+|(^Subject: [a-zA-Z])+

and I’m matching it using this code:

regex = re.compile(pattern, flags=re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE)
result = regex.match(text).groups() 

but this is only matching the first line. I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong nor do I seem to understand how to write regular expressions correctly

>Solution :

Trying to stay close to your approach, the pattern ^From: ([ a-zA-Z]*)\nTo: ([ a-zA-Z]*) results in:

>>> result
('sender name', 'the recepient')

Now, why doesn’t your pattern work?

1. (^From: [a-zA-Z]*) would never capture sender name because you’re not allowing any whitespace with [a-zA-Z]
2. Using the A|B pattern makes it so the engine matches either A OR B, so it wouldn’t look for your To: pattern after encountering From: