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 characte

Answer 1

Typescript. Gets string in between two other strings.

Searches shortest string between prefixes and postfixes

prefixes - string / array of strings / null (means search from the start).

postfixes - string / array of strings / null (means search until the end).

public getStringInBetween(str: string, prefixes: string | string[] | null,
                          postfixes: string | string[] | null): string {

    if (typeof prefixes === 'string') {
        prefixes = [prefixes];
    }

    if (typeof postfixes === 'string') {
        postfixes = [postfixes];
    }

    if (!str || str.length < 1) {
        throw new Error(str + ' should contain ' + prefixes);
    }

    let start = prefixes === null ? { pos: 0, sub: '' } : this.indexOf(str, prefixes);
    const end = postfixes === null ? { pos: str.length, sub: '' } : this.indexOf(str, postfixes, start.pos + start.sub.length);

    let value = str.substring(start.pos + start.sub.length, end.pos);
    if (!value || value.length < 1) {
        throw new Error(str + ' should contain string in between ' + prefixes + ' and ' + postfixes);
    }

    while (true) {
        try {
            start = this.indexOf(value, prefixes);
        } catch (e) {
            break;
        }
        value = value.substring(start.pos + start.sub.length);
        if (!value || value.length < 1) {
            throw new Error(str + ' should contain string in between ' + prefixes + ' and ' + postfixes);
        }
    }

    return value;
}

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.

Answer 3

import re
print re.search('AAA(.*?)ZZZ', 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk').group(1)

Answer 4

You can use re module for that:

>>> import re
>>> re.compile(".*AAA(.*)ZZZ.*").match("gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk").groups()
('1234,)

Answer 5

regular expression

import re

re.search(r"(?<=AAA).*?(?=ZZZ)", your_text).group(0)

The above as-is will fail with an AttributeError if there are no "AAA" and "ZZZ" in your_text

string methods

your_text.partition("AAA")[2].partition("ZZZ")[0]

The above will return an empty string if either "AAA" or "ZZZ" don't exist in your_text.

PS Python Challenge?

Answer 6

Using PyParsing

import pyparsing as pp

word = pp.Word(pp.alphanums)

s = 'gfgfdAAA1234ZZZuijjk'
rule = pp.nestedExpr('AAA', 'ZZZ')
for match in rule.searchString(s):
    print(match)

which yields:

[['1234']]