Find string between two substrings

user_374797 0
Viewed 672750

How do I find a string between two substrings ('123STRINGabc' -> 'STRING')?

My current method is like this:

>>> start = 'asdf=5;'
>>> end = '123jasd'
>>> s = 'asdf=5;iwantthis123jasd'
>>> print((s.split(start))[1].split(end)[0])
iwantthis

However, this seems very inefficient and un-pythonic. What is a better way to do something like this?

Forgot to mention: The string might not start and end with start and end. They may have more characters before and after.

substring python string
20 Answers

If you don't want to import anything, try the string method .index():

text = 'I want to find a string between two substrings'
left = 'find a '
right = 'between two'

# Output: 'string'
print(text[text.index(left)+len(left):text.index(right)])
user_34236390

Here is a function I did to return a list with a string(s) inbetween string1 and string2 searched.

def GetListOfSubstrings(stringSubject,string1,string2):
    MyList = []
    intstart=0
    strlength=len(stringSubject)
    continueloop = 1

    while(intstart < strlength and continueloop == 1):
        intindex1=stringSubject.find(string1,intstart)
        if(intindex1 != -1): #The substring was found, lets proceed
            intindex1 = intindex1+len(string1)
            intindex2 = stringSubject.find(string2,intindex1)
            if(intindex2 != -1):
                subsequence=stringSubject[intindex1:intindex2]
                MyList.append(subsequence)
                intstart=intindex2+len(string2)
            else:
                continueloop=0
        else:
            continueloop=0
    return MyList


#Usage Example
mystring="s123y123o123pp123y6"
List = GetListOfSubstrings(mystring,"1","y68")
for x in range(0, len(List)):
               print(List[x])
output:


mystring="s123y123o123pp123y6"
List = GetListOfSubstrings(mystring,"1","3")
for x in range(0, len(List)):
              print(List[x])
output:
    2
    2
    2
    2

mystring="s123y123o123pp123y6"
List = GetListOfSubstrings(mystring,"1","y")
for x in range(0, len(List)):
               print(List[x])
output:
23
23o123pp123
user_5871340

Parsing text with delimiters from different email platforms posed a larger-sized version of this problem. They generally have a START and a STOP. Delimiter characters for wildcards kept choking regex. The problem with split is mentioned here & elsewhere - oops, delimiter character gone. It occurred to me to use replace() to give split() something else to consume. Chunk of code:

nuke = '~~~'
start = '|*'
stop = '*|'
julien = (textIn.replace(start,nuke + start).replace(stop,stop + nuke).split(nuke))
keep = [chunk for chunk in julien if start in chunk and stop in chunk]
logging.info('keep: %s',keep)
user_22844470
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