I have strings that look something like this:
'T1 Test 2 Sku Red Widget at 10.0'
To extract 'Red Widget' I have been using the code below:
s = 'T1 Test 2 Sku Red Widget at 10.0'
t = s[s.find('Sku ')+4 : s.find(' at')]
print(t)
This worked fine but now the string inputs have changed so that they may contain either 'Sku' (the starting sub-string) or 'Id'.
This code obviously won't work when 'Id' is used so how can I adapt it to capture both scenarios?
One way to do this would be with regex:
import re
s1 = 'T1 Test 2 Sku Red Widget at 10.0'
s2 = 'T1 Test 2 Id Red Widget at 10.0'
pat = '(?:(?<=Sku\s)|(?<=Id\s)).*(?=\sat)'
print(re.search(pat,s1).group(0)) # returns Red Widget
print(re.search(pat,s2).group(0)) # also returns Red Widget
How does this work?
We make use of lookbehinds and lookaheads. The first set of expressions in the regex specify that we should look for text that is preceded either by 'Sku' or by 'Id' followed by a space. The second set does the same but looking ahead instead, for a space followed by 'at'. Whatever matches these conditions is extracted by the function.
You could always add an if statement in there:
if 'Sku ' in s:
start_substring = 'Sku '
offset = 4
else:
start_substring = 'Id '
offset = 3
t = s[s.find(start_substring)+offset : s.find(' at')]
print(t)
You can also do it like this
import re
s = 'T1 Test 2 Sku Red Widget at 10.0' # or input string
re_pattern = "Red Widget"
regex = re.compile(re_pattern)
for m in regex.finditer(s):
print( m.group())
