Find string between two substrings [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How to extract the substring between two markers? 13 answers

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.

Answer 1

You can simply use this code or copy the function below. All neatly in one line.

def substring(whole, sub1, sub2):
    return whole[whole.index(sub1) : whole.index(sub2)]

If you run the function as follows.

print(substring("5+(5*2)+2", "(", "("))

You will pobably be left with the output:

(5*2

rather than

5*2

If you want to have the sub-strings on the end of the output the code must look like below.

return whole[whole.index(sub1) : whole.index(sub2) + 1]

But if you don't want the substrings on the end the +1 must be on the first value.

return whole[whole.index(sub1) + 1 : whole.index(sub2)]

Answer 2

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)

Answer 3

Just converting the OP's own solution into an answer:

def find_between(s, start, end):
  return (s.split(start))[1].split(end)[0]

Answer 4

Further from Nikolaus Gradwohl answer, I needed to get version number (i.e., 0.0.2) between('ui:' and '-') from below file content (filename: docker-compose.yml):

    version: '3.1'
services:
  ui:
    image: repo-pkg.dev.io:21/website/ui:0.0.2-QA1
    #network_mode: host
    ports:
      - 443:9999
    ulimits:
      nofile:test

and this is how it worked for me (python script):

import re, sys

f = open('docker-compose.yml', 'r')
lines = f.read()
result = re.search('ui:(.*)-', lines)
print result.group(1)


Result:
0.0.2

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

from timeit import timeit
from re import search, DOTALL


def partition_find(string, start, end):
    return string.partition(start)[2].rpartition(end)[0]


def re_find(string, start, end):
    # applying re.escape to start and end would be safer
    return search(start + '(.*)' + end, string, DOTALL).group(1)


def index_find(string, start, end):
    return string[string.find(start) + len(start):string.rfind(end)]


# The wikitext of "Alan Turing law" article form English Wikipeida
# https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alan_Turing_law&action=edit&oldid=763725886
string = """..."""
start = '==Proposals=='
end = '==Rival bills=='

assert index_find(string, start, end) \
       == partition_find(string, start, end) \
       == re_find(string, start, end)

print('index_find', timeit(
    'index_find(string, start, end)',
    globals=globals(),
    number=100_000,
))

print('partition_find', timeit(
    'partition_find(string, start, end)',
    globals=globals(),
    number=100_000,
))

print('re_find', timeit(
    're_find(string, start, end)',
    globals=globals(),
    number=100_000,
))

Result:

index_find 0.35047444528454114
partition_find 0.5327825636197754
re_find 7.552149639286381

re_find was almost 20 times slower than index_find in this example.