Question

I am trying to write code that will take a string and remove specific data from it. I know that the data will look like the line below, and I only need the data within the ” ” marks, not the marks themselves.

inputString = 'type="NN" span="123..145" confidence="1.0" '

Is there a way to take a Substring of a string within two characters to know the start and stop points?

Answer 1

You can extract all the text between pairs of " characters using regular expressions:

import re
inputString='type="NN" span="123..145" confidence="1.0" '
pat=re.compile('"([^"]*)"')
while True:
        mat=pat.search(inputString)
        if mat is None:
                break
        strings.append(mat.group(1))
        inputString=inputString[mat.end():]
print strings

or, easier:

import re
inputString='type="NN" span="123..145" confidence="1.0" '
strings=re.findall('"([^"]*)"', inputString)
print strings

Output for both versions:

['NN', '123..145', '1.0']