How can I extract a multi-substrings from a string in python?

Question

I need help with extracting multiple substrings from a string and assign it to a list, and those required substrings have similar start substring and end substring,

for example if I have a string like this: "start something something end start nothing nothing end"

how do I extract "something something" and "nothing nothing" and append it to a list.

Extract them based on what? If you know "something something" can't you just create a string containing "something something"? — Chris
– Chris, Commented Nov 2, 2019 at 16:23
Welcome to Stack Overflow. Please take the tour and then read How to Ask. — Chris
– Chris, Commented Nov 2, 2019 at 16:26
Not sure exactly what you are looking for but have a look at the re module. It should be able to get you where you want if you are looking at extracting words based on context. — Snek
– Snek, Commented Nov 2, 2019 at 16:27

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-20 09:12:55Z

4

You can use re.findall.


>>> text = 'start something something end start nothing nothing end'
>>> re.findall('start (.+?) end', text)
['something something', 'nothing nothing']

Return all non-overlapping matches of pattern in string, as a list of strings.

Pattern is

start followed by a space
the ( indicates the start of the part (group) we're interested in
the . indicates arbitrary character
the +? indicates at least one, but as little as possible
the ) indicates the end of the part (group) wer're interested in
a space followed by end.

The string is scanned left-to-right, and matches are returned in the order found.

If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups;

We're using groups, as shown above

this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.

We only use one group.

Empty matches are included in the result.

edited Jun 20, 2020 at 9:12

CommunityBot

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answered Nov 2, 2019 at 16:28

Stefan Kögl

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1 Comment

CodeIt Over a year ago

This should also work fine str = [string.split("start")[1].strip() for string in str.split("end")[:-1]]. See it in action here.

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