[python] Get the string within brackets in Python

I have a sample string <alpha.Customer[cus_Y4o9qMEZAugtnW] active_card=<alpha.AlphaObject[card] ...>, created=1324336085, description='Customer for My Test App', livemode=False>

I only want the value cus_Y4o9qMEZAugtnW and NOT card (which is inside another [])

How could I do it in easiest possible way in Python? Maybe by using RegEx (which I am not good at)?

This question is related to python regex brackets

The answer is


This should do the job:

re.match(r"[^[]*\[([^]]*)\]", yourstring).groups()[0]

your_string = "lnfgbdgfi343456dsfidf[my data] ljfbgns47647jfbgfjbgskj"
your_string[your_string.find("[")+1 : your_string.find("]")]

courtesy: Regular expression to return text between parenthesis


You can also use

re.findall(r"\[([A-Za-z0-9_]+)\]", string)

if there are many occurrences that you would like to find.

See also for more info: How can I find all matches to a regular expression in Python?


How about this ? Example illusrated using a file:

f = open('abc.log','r')
content = f.readlines()
for line in content:
    m = re.search(r"\[(.*?)\]", line)
    print m.group(1)
    

Hope this helps:

Magic regex : \[(.*?)\]

Explanation:

\[ : [ is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.

(.*?) : match everything in a non-greedy way and capture it.

\] : ] is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.


You could use str.split to do this.

s = "<alpha.Customer[cus_Y4o9qMEZAugtnW] active_card=<alpha.AlphaObject[card]\
 ...>, created=1324336085, description='Customer for My Test App',\
 livemode=False>"
val = s.split('[', 1)[1].split(']')[0]

Then we have:

>>> val
'cus_Y4o9qMEZAugtnW'

You can use

import re

s = re.search(r"\[.*?]", string)
if s:
    print(s.group(0))