Question

I need to fix some text that lies between delimiters for the following cases:
Case 1: {12345} (numbers between curlies) should become item_12345 (added ‘item_’, removed braces).
Case 2: [999] (numbers between square brackets) should become total_999

So this string: {242424} from X [100] bulks, linked to {57575757} from Y for [500] units
should appear like this: item_242424 from X total_100 bulks, linked to item_57575757 from Y for total_500 units

How can this be done with regex?

Answer 1

This should get you started:

s = '{123} and [456]'

s = re.sub(r'\{(.+?)\}', r'foo_\1', s)
s = re.sub(r'\[(.+?)\]', r'bar_\1', s)

print s