[FIXED] Python Regex on PAN card

Issue

I'm retrieving PAN number from PAN card. When I scrape pan number, some times it has some spaces between few numbers like DWKP K3344E, where the actual PAN number expression would be ABCDE1234F. I want to consider that spaces too all over the scraped number in regex.

import re
if re.search(r'^([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){5}([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){4}([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){1}?$', 'DWKP K3344E'):
    print("True")
else:
    print("False")

The regex code should return true for the above content too. In order to do that just want to modify the r'^([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){5}([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){4}([a-z?A-Z?0-9]){1}?$' part in the code.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

I suggest removing the whitespaces (say, using re.sub(r'\s+', '', text) to ensure all Unicode whitespaces are gone) from the string before checking it with a regex.

Besides, your regex contains question marks in the character classes and thus these chars are allowed in the input. You must remove them.

Try

if re.search(r'^[a-zA-Z]{5}[0-9]{4}[a-zA-Z]$', re.sub(r'\s+', '', text)):
    # do something

Here, re.sub(r'\s+', '', text) removes all possible whitespaces from the text first, then ^[a-zA-Z0-9]{5}[0-9]{4}[a-zA-Z]$ ensures the result matches:

• ^ - start of the string
• [a-zA-Z]{5} - five letters
• [0-9]{4} - four digits
• [a-zA-Z] - a letter
• $ - end of string.

See the regex demo.

Answered By - Wiktor Stribiżew