Parse string with words surrounded by curly braces to array in Python 3.5

I've a string like this:

"asdf FIELD1n adf FIELD2 asdf adsfFIELD3asdf FIELD4"


What I need is an array containing the strings "FIELD1", "FIELD2", "FIELD3", "FIELD4". In other words: Find all text enclosed by and and put it to an array. Is there an easy/clever way to do this with Python 3.5 ?

2 Answers
2

easy with regular expressions as long as the braces cannot be nested:

>>> import re
>>> re.findall(r"(.*?)","asdf FIELD1n adf FIELD2 asdf adsfFIELD3asdf FIELD4")
['FIELD1', 'FIELD2', 'FIELD3', 'FIELD4']


findall conveniently creates a list of all matching expressions in the input.

findall

list

the (.*?) expression extracts the data between the curly braces (that you have to escape because they are special in regex language (repeating groups), even if they aren't interpreted as such in this particular context, so they could be omitted).

(.*?)

The parentheses are used to only extract the non-curly brace part and the .*? makes sure that you're matching the closest closing curly brace (non-greedy mode).

.*?

It's also good practice to use raw string prefix for regexes (even if it's not absolutely useful here, it avoids the infamous 1 and b traps)

1

b

For completeness sake you can also use str.split to obtain your desired output:

str.split

s = "asdf FIELD1n adf FIELD2 asdf adsfFIELD3asdf FIELD4"
[i.split('')[0] for i in s.split('{')[1:]]


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