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Python-Get String Between Two Characters

Started by koka282 Aug 3, 2016 at 7:56 PM 2 replies 3.8k views

Original Post

Aug 3, 2016 at 7:56 PM

I need to one give me the string between ~ and ^.
I have a string like this:


~~~~ ABC ^ DEF ^ HGK > LMN ^

I need to get the string between them with python.
I've tried this:


import re
target = ' ~~~~ ABC ^ DEF ^ HGK > LMN ^ '
matchObj = re.findall(r'~(.*?)\^', target)
print matchObj But the result is:['~~~ ABC ']

What I expect is:


[ABC , DEF , HGK , LMN ]


[^ABC , ^DEF , ^HGK , LMN ]

I want to do all this because i am trying to extract text from an html page. like this example


<td class="cell-1">
 ~~~~ ABC ^ DEF ^ HGK > LMN ^ 
</td>

shadowisadog

Aug 4, 2016 at 5:42 AM

I would do it something like this personally:

I would start off by replacing the '~' characters in the string since they do not seem to add anything. You could replace these with an empty string. Then use re.split with either the '^' or '>' characters. You have to escape '^' because it has special meaning to a regular expression. Using the pipe character creates an or condition in a regular expression.

Then that would give me results but they would have a lot of whitespace, so I would use a list comprehension to get rid of the extra whitespace and to omit any blank entries from the list.

Below is the code:


#!/usr/bin/env python

import re

def main():
    target = ' ~~~~ ABC ^ DEF ^ HGK > LMN ^ '
    target = target.replace('~', '')
    target_list = re.split('\^|>', target)
    target_list = [entry.strip() for entry in target_list if len(entry.strip()) > 0]
    print(target_list)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

That gives me: