How to extract substrings from a formatted string with pattern?

Question

I want to extract specific substrings from a formatted string. For example, the raw string is 19592@click(className='android.widget.TextView',instance='15'):android.widget.TextView@"All".

I'd like to extract "click", "android.widget.TextView", "15", "android.widget.TextView@"All"" from the string above. Is this a problem that can be solved by python regex? I'm not sure which APIs I should use.

Does this answer your question? [Match text between two strings with regular expression](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32680030/match-text-between-two-strings-with-regular-expression) — Linh Nguyen, Dec 03 '19 at 06:53

Priyanka Khairnar · Answer 1 · 2019-12-03T07:11:17.523

2

Does this answer your question? - https://www.w3resource.com/python-exercises/re/python-re-exercise-47.php

Or else you can use - https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html

Here config parser will parse your string can give you all the values separated by delimiters(@, =, :)

edited Dec 03 '19 at 07:11

answered Dec 03 '19 at 07:04

Priyanka Khairnar

366
2
19

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 03 '19 at 07:06

I know regex is what you asked for but maybe you could do with plain find which is more efficient:

def find_between(s, first, last):
    first_pos = s.find(first)
    last_pos = s.find(last)
    if first_pos < 0 or last_pos < 0:
        return None
    first_pos = first_pos + len(first)
    return s[first_pos:last_pos]

and then:

s = '19592@click(className=\'android.widget.TextView\',instance=\'15\'):android.widget.TextView@"All"'
print find_between(s, "@", "(")
Out[0]: 'click'

print find_between(s, "className=", ",")
Out[18]: "'android.widget.TextView'"

How to extract substrings from a formatted string with pattern?

2 Answers2