Python extract string between delimiters

To extract a string between delimiters in Python, you can use regular expressions (regex). The re module in Python provides functions to work with regular expressions.

You can use regex

import re
s = re.findall('\[(.*?)\]', str)

For example, in the string "Hello [World]! How [are] you doing?", if the delimiters are set as [ and ], the extracted substrings would be "World" and "are" respectively.

import re

text = "Hello [World]! How [are] you doing?"

result = re.findall('\[(.*?)\]', text)

print(result)  # Output: ['World', 'are']

Python extracts string between delimiters example

Here’s an example of how to extract strings between delimiters using the regular expression method that I mentioned earlier:

def extract_str(text, start_delimiter, end_delimiter):
    start_index = text.find(start_delimiter)
    end_index = text.find(end_delimiter, start_index + len(start_delimiter))

    if start_index != -1 and end_index != -1:
        return text[start_index + len(start_delimiter):end_index]
    else:
        return None

# Example usage:
text = "This is a [sample] text with [multiple] delimiters."
start_delimiter = "["
end_delimiter = "]"

result = extract_str(text, start_delimiter, end_delimiter)
print(result) 

Output:

Both methods will yield the same result. The find() method is used to locate the positions of the start_delimiter and end_delimiter in the text. If both delimiters are found, the desired substring is extracted using string slicing.

Note: these methods will return the first occurrence of the substring between the delimiters if there are multiple occurrences. If there are no occurrences of the delimiters, they will return None.

Note: IDE: PyCharm 2021.3.3 (Community Edition)

Windows 10

Python 3.10.1

All Python Examples are in Python 3, so Maybe its different from python 2 or upgraded versions.