How to get the string between two points using regex or any other library in Python 3?
For eg: Blah blah ABC the string to be retrieved XYZ Blah Blah
ABC and XYZ are variables which denote the start and end of the string which I have to retrieve.
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2 Answers
Use ABC and XYZ as anchors with look-behind and look-ahead assertions:
(?<=ABC).*?(?=XYZ) The (?<=...) look-behind assertion only matches at the location in the text that was preceded by ABC. Similarly, (?=XYZ) matches at the location that is followed by XYZ. Together they form two anchors that limit the .* expression, which matches anything.
You can find all such anchored pieces of text with re.findall():
for matchedtext in re.findall(r'(?<=ABC).*?(?=XYZ)', inputtext): If ABC and XYZ are variable, you want to use re.escape() (to prevent any of their content from being interpreted as regular expression syntax) on them and interpolate:
re.match(r'(?<={}).*?(?={})'.format(abc, xyz), inputtext) answered Jun 17, 2013 at 15:41
Martijn Pieters
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Comments
I think this is what you want:
import re match = re.search('ABC(.*)XYZ','Blah blah ABC the string to be retrieved XYZ Blah Blah') print match.group(1) 
3 Comments
Casimir et Hippolyte
good way, but add a question mark after the * quantifier to make it lazy if you don't want to match something like
ABC( ... XYZ ... )XYZ
sgp
@user1572508 ABC and XYZ are variables to be taken from the user
Yogeesh Seralathan
What if I just want the content in '(.*)' ?