Question

I have a very long string of text with () and [] in it. I’m trying to remove the characters between the parentheses and brackets but I cannot figure out how.

The list is similar to this:

x = "This is a sentence. (once a day) [twice a day]"

This list isn’t what I’m working with but is very similar and a lot shorter.

Answer 1

This should work for parentheses. Regular expressions will "consume" the text it has matched so it won’t work for nested parentheses.

import re
regex = re.compile(".*?\((.*?)\)")
result = re.findall(regex, mystring)

or this would find one set of parentheses, simply loop to find more:

start = mystring.find("(")
end = mystring.find(")")
if start != -1 and end != -1:
  result = mystring[start+1:end]