Extracting text between curly braces in python

Question

I have a string of text like following

1. Foobar { abc } ( Explanation - Foo { cde } - Count - 5301435 ) 2. Foobaz { memo } ( Explanation - baz {bleh } - Count - 13946664 )

And I want to extract abc and memo in the above string. I have the regex as follows [link here] essentially {(?:[^{}])*} But it captures everything (returns abc, cde, memo, bleh)

Answer 1

I would keep it simple.

import re

s = '1. Foobar { abc } ( Explanation - Foo { cde } - Count - 5301435 ) 2. Foobaz { memo } ( Explanation - baz {bleh } - Count - 13946664 )'

s_without_parens = re.sub('\(.+?\)','',s)

text_in_brackets = re.findall('{(.+?)}',s_without_parens)

text_in_brackets

[' abc ', ' memo ']

So you can nest that as re.findall('{(.+?)}',re.sub('\(.+?\)','',s)), but I find it helpful to break it into logical steps.