Most pythonic way to delete text between two delimiters

Question

I'm trying to remove wiki formatting from some text so it can be parsed.

What is the most pythonic way to remove two delimiters ('[[' and ']]') all the text between them? The given string will contain multiple occurrences of delimiter pairs.

Answer 1

Regular expressions are a good match for your problem.

>>> import re
>>> input_str = 'foo [[bar]] baz [[etc.]]'

If you are wanting to remove the whole [[...]], which is I think what you are asking about,

>>> re.sub(r'\[\[.*?\]\]', '', input_str)
'foo  baz '

If you are wanting to leave the contents of the [[...]] in,

>>> re.sub(r'\[\[(.*?)\]\]', r'\1', input_str)
'foo bar baz etc.'