How to extract the substring between two markers?

Question

Let's say I have a string 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk' and I want to extract just the '1234' part.

I only know what will be the few characters directly before AAA, and after ZZZ the part I am interested in 1234.

With sed it is possible to do something like this with a string:

echo "$STRING" | sed -e "s|.*AAA\(.*\)ZZZ.*|\1|" 

And this will give me 1234 as a result.

How to do the same thing in Python?

Answer 1

Using regular expressions - documentation for further reference

import re  text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'  m = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text) if m:     found = m.group(1)  # found: 1234 

or:

import re  text = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'  try:     found = re.search('AAA(.+?)ZZZ', text).group(1) except AttributeError:     # AAA, ZZZ not found in the original string     found = '' # apply your error handling  # found: 1234 

Answer 2

>>> s = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk' >>> start = s.find('AAA') + 3 >>> end = s.find('ZZZ', start) >>> s[start:end] '1234' 

Then you can use regexps with the re module as well, if you want, but that's not necessary in your case.