Question

I have a noisy data..something like

<@ """@$ FSDF >something something <more noise>

Now I just want to extract "something something".
Is there a way on how to delete the text between those two delimiters "<" and ">"?

Answer 1

Use regular expressions:

>>> import re
>>> s = '<@ """@$ FSDF >something something <more noise>'
>>> re.sub('<[^>]+>', '', s)
'something something '

[Update]

If you tried a pattern like <.+>, where the dot means any character and the plus sign means one or more, you know it does not work.

>>> re.sub(r'<.+>', s, '')
''

Why!?! It happens because regular expressions are “greedy” by default. The expression will match anything until the end of the string, including the > – and this is not what we want. We want to match < and stop on the next >, so we use the [^x] pattern which means “any character but x” (x being >).

The ? operator turns the match “non-greedy”, so this has the same effect:

>>> re.sub(r'<.+?>', '', s)
'something something '

The previous is more explicit, this one is less typing; be aware that x? means zero or one occurrence of x.