Question

I looked around, but couldn’t find what I was looking for….

Basically I have a string with lots of asterisks scattered around:

Example: red blue green * hello* pink orange 4pgp42g4jg42 * world* violet black

What I am trying to do is split the string up so I can extract “hello” and “world” and eventually print them out as a list using a for statement. The strings I’m working with are longer and do not necessarily have any set number of slices that I would want to take out.

Could anyone assist me with this please?

Thank you

Answer 1

Have you ever tried the re module? It uses a syntax called regular expression that allows you to do very complicated matches (see the docs here). In your case, you could try something like this:

import re

# Store your string
my_str = 'red blue green * hello* pink orange 4pgp42g4jg42 * world* violet black'

# Find matches
match = re.findall(r'\*([^\*]*)\*', my_str)

# Print everything
print match

# Iterate
for item in match:
    print item