How to extract the substring between two markers?

Posted By: Anonymous

Let’s say I have a string 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk' and I want to extract just the '1234' part.

I only know what will be the few characters directly before AAA, and after ZZZ the part I am interested in 1234.

With sed it is possible to do something like this with a string:

echo "$STRING" | sed -e "s|.*AAA(.*)ZZZ.*|1|"

And this will give me 1234 as a result.

How to do the same thing in Python?

Solution

Using regular expressions – documentation for further reference

import re

text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'

m = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text)
if m:
    found = m.group(1)

# found: 1234

or:

import re

text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'

try:
    found = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text).group(1)
except AttributeError:
    # AAA, ZZZ not found in the original string
    found = '' # apply your error handling

# found: 1234

Answered By: Anonymous

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