Best way to find strings between two points

Question

I know this is fairly basic, however I was wondering what the best way to find a string between two referenced points.

For example:

finding the string between 2 commas:

Hello, This is the string I want, blabla

My initial thought would be to create a list and have it do something like this:

stringtext= []
commacount = 0
word=""
for i in "Hello, This is the string I want, blabla":
    if i == "," and commacount != 1:
        commacount = 1
    elif i == "," and commacount == 1:
        commacount = 0
    if commacount == 1:
        stringtext.append(i)

print stringtext
for e in stringtext:
    word += str(e)

print word

However I was wondering if there was an easier way, or perhaps a way that is just simply different. Thankyou!

Answer 1

This is what str.split(delimiter) is for.
It returns a list, which you can do [1] or iterate through.

>>> foo = "Hello, this is the string I want, blabla"
>>> foo.split(',')
['Hello', ' this is the string I want', ' blabla']
>>> foo.split(',')[1]
' this is the string I want'

If you want to get rid of the leading space you can use str.lstrip(), or str.strip() to also remove trailing:

>>> foo.split(',')[1].lstrip()
'this is the string I want'

There's usually a built-in method available for something as simple as this in Python :-)
For more information check out Built-in Types - String methods