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

To extract STRING, try:

myString = '123STRINGabc'
startString = '123'
endString = 'abc'

mySubString=myString[myString.find(startString)+len(startString):myString.find(endString)]

Answer 2

These solutions assume the start string and final string are different. Here is a solution I use for an entire file when the initial and final indicators are the same, assuming the entire file is read using readlines():

def extractstring(line,flag='$'):
    if flag in line: # $ is the flag
        dex1=line.index(flag)
        subline=line[dex1+1:-1] #leave out flag (+1) to end of line
        dex2=subline.index(flag)
        string=subline[0:dex2].strip() #does not include last flag, strip whitespace
    return(string)

Example:

lines=['asdf 1qr3 qtqay 45q at $A NEWT?$ asdfa afeasd',
    'afafoaltat $I GOT BETTER!$ derpity derp derp']
for line in lines:
    string=extractstring(line,flag='$')
    print(string)

Gives:

A NEWT?
I GOT BETTER!