regex for Twitter username
(?<=^|(?<=[^a-zA-Z0-9-_\.]))@([A-Za-z]+[A-Za-z0-9-_]+)
I've used this as it disregards emails.
Here is a sample tweet:
@Hello how are @you doing @my_friend, email @000 me @ [email protected] @shahmirj
Matches:
- @Hello
- @you
- @my_friend
- @shahmirj
It will also work for hashtags, I use the same expression with the @ changed to #.
If you're talking about the @username thing they use on twitter, then you can use this:
import re
twitter_username_re = re.compile(r'@([A-Za-z0-9_]+)')
To make every instance an HTML link, you could do something like this:
my_html_str = twitter_username_re.sub(lambda m: '<a href="http://twitter.com/%s">%s</a>' % (m.group(1), m.group(0)), my_tweet)