How to limit regex's findall() method

Question

Is there a regex equivalent of BeautifulSoup's limit=X argument for the findall method? I mean, how to find the first X words in question and then break the code execution? thank you

Answer 1

Use re.finditer and itertools.islice:

from itertools import islice
import re

limit = 2

for x in islice(re.finditer(r'\d+', '1 2 33'), limit):
    print(x.group())

As a function:

def findall_limiter(pattern, string, flags=0):
    return islice(re.finditer(pattern, string, flags), limit)

eg.

for match in findall_limiter(r'\d+', '1 2 33', 2):
    # do stuff